LESLIE KRIMS
LESLIE KRIMS SEDE DI BRESCIA Via Trieste, 48 Tel/Fax +39 030 2906352 Mob. +39 3487617028 SEDE DI PORTO CERVO Via del Porto Vecchio, [email protected] mob +39 3487617028 [email protected] www.pacicontemporary.com Member of:IDEAZIONE / CONCEPT: Questo catalogo è stato pubblicatoPaci contemporary gallery team in occasione di Paris Photo 2014.TESTO A CURA DI / TEXT BY: COPYRIGHT:Leslie Krims © opere e testi: Leslie KrimsTRADUZIONE / TRANSLATION: ISBN 978-88-6414-006-3Federica Manfredini STAMPA:COORDINAMENTO E COMUNICAZIONE / Agora35 - BresciaCOORDINATION AND COMMUNICATION:Giampaolo Paci, Federica Manfredini, Monica Banfi
Nude Americadi Leslie KrimsHo iniziato ad usare la macchina fotografica fin da bambino, facevo alcuni scatti a mia madre con una macchina poco costosa, la Ansco.Prendevo i negativi e, in un posto vicino a dove abitavo, cercavo di stampare. Facevo sempre fotografie piccole. Mia madre per incoraggiarmimi comprò un piccolo set di oli tra cui c’erano tele, carte e penne. Già all’età di 12 anni feci una copia del ritratto di Vincent van Gogh diAugustine Roudin ma iniziai ad elaborare immagini solo dopo essermi diplomato nel ‘65 quando presi la mia prima macchina fotografica,la mia prima 35mm (una Nikon). Dopo essermi diplomato alla scuola di scienze, la Stuyvesant High School di New York, intrapresi lostudio dell’architettura; entrai nel 1960 alla Cooper Union for the Advancement di scienze e arte, e durante il primo anno studiai arte earchitettura mentre i successivi tre frequentai nuovi corsi (pittura, scultura, storia dell’arte, design, stampa) facendo sempre avanti e in-dietro dal mio piccolo appartamento di Brooklyn dove vivevo con mia madre. Conseguito il diploma alla Cooper Union iniziai a lavorare peralcuni mesi presso una rivista d’arte a Manhattan. Nel Dicembre del 1965, entrato al Pratt Institute, presi una Nikon e cominciai a seguireil corso di fotografia. Allora esibivo le mie fotografie alle mostre per studenti e fu proprio in quegli anni che rimasi colpito dalla fotografiadi forte impatto, tanto da rimanerne influenzato. Non ho viaggiato molto. Nell’estate del ’75 rimasi a Tokyo per un mese, poi circa 30anni fa visitai per una settimana Arles a sud della Francia, feci tappa a Vigo in Spagna e mi recai due volte a Parigi. Quando ero ragazzomio padre viveva in California, poi andò a Las Ve-gas dove visse per 19 anni e durante gli anni ’50, io lasciavo New York per trascorrerele estati con mio padre prima in California e poi a Las Vegas. Questi viaggi mi aiutarono a vedere le diverse possibilità che la vita offre, lavarietà di prospettive esistenti in America e soprattutto capii che Manhattan non era al centro dell’universo. Molte delle immagini che horealizzato sono allegoriche ma non da tutti comprese e ritenute affascinanti. Quella tendenza progressista di cui parla William Hogarth,delle otto angolature del mondo, può per esempio ricondursi al mio lavoro come in A marxist view..., immagine che offre un’ampia vedutainnanzitutto per la varietà dei soggetti presenti. Benché io non sia mai stato un fotografo attivista, la maggior parte del mio lavoro ècomunque antagonista ai critici e ai fotografi del-la sinistra radicale americana perché ironizza sulle loro idee e sulle loro metodologie. Dal‘65 la fotografia americana era per la maggior parte in-centrata sulla ricerca documentaristica e sociale mentre i fotografi decantavano leidee di Mao e Marx, escludendo quelle di Thomas Jefferson o Abraham Lincoln. Io, già allora, ero un moderato, democratico. Tuttavia, findagli inizi degli anni ’30, l’attivismo fotografico politicizzato era usato per promuovere progetti socia-li ma di concezione radicale. Purtroppo,allora, era questo l’unico modo di vede-re la fotografia e anche negli anni ’60 i metodi non mutarono, anzi, i fotografi non si iscrivevanonemmeno alle scuole d’arte e la fotografia stessa non era considerata arte. Ancora negli anni ’70 pittori, curatori e galleristi non valutavanol’immagine fotografica come artistica. Il fotografo era considerato “old paper” – (termine utilizzato nel mercato antico) e solamente pochimusei potevano vantare anche una collezione di fotografia. La verità è che i miei lavori e quelli di altri dovevano essere ancora codificatisotto nuove direzioni. Il nostro approccio destabilizzava tanto i tradizionalisti quanto gli attivisti: questo accade spesso nel mondo dell’arteperché non è mai stato semplice proporre un gusto o una maniera diversa dalla norma. Quello che ho fatto è stato ironizzare sugli aspettipiù radicali di una cultura. Ho messo in chiave assolutamente sarcastica comportamenti e tendenze estremiste. Non sorprende se le mieimmagini sono più accettate in Europa che negli USA ma a volte non capite in quanto critica culturale. Quello che creo è pura satira. satirache colpisce un gruppo radicale e forviato. La stampa digitale è stata la maggiore invenzione tecnologica da quando Gorge Eastman hainventato il rullino. Amo il controllo che si può avere creando con Photoshop. In verità, non amavo il lavoro in camera oscura e così mi sonocreato una personale e stravagante maniera. Il lavoro dei “set” anche se costoso da produrre è molto interessante. Negli ultimi 10 anni c’èstata una sorprendente evoluzione tecnica delle stampe digitali che ha permesso di rendere possibile grandi riproduzioni lavorando da soli.(Tale rivoluzione tecnica trova un nesso e un senso solo nella rivoluzione del pensiero nel passaggio al capitalismo). Lavorare con il nudo nonè niente di nuovo e soprattutto non lo era per me fotografare mia madre. Iniziai a fare i primi scatti a casa ed era naturale che io prendessimia madre come modella e la trattassi come tale ma furono questi soggetti a causarmi il duro attacco del movimento Femminista deglianni ’60, come fu con Andrea Dworkin. Penso fosse stato il forte legame con mia madre ad aver generato l’assurda collera di queste donneverso il mio lavoro e la mia fotografia fu attaccata violentemente al punto che io diventai il loro bersaglio. La “left’s politically correct” chedefinisce quelle idee più radicali, sfortunatamente, venne abbracciata dalla maggior parte delle accademie ufficiali di fotografia causandoil controllo degli attivisti sulle arti e sulla cultura accademica (assurdo percorso che portò ad accademie petulanti, dispotiche, maligne evendicative, in un paese privo di totalitarismi e soprattutto dopo la Rivoluzione degli anni ’60). Le mie fotografie, in particolare le immaginipiù recenti dove utilizzo testo/immagine, rappresentano la mia maniera di ironizzare sulla politica più radicale. È l’unione di testi edimmagine che più mi permette di decostruire quei messaggi ipocriti ed irritanti di certe posizioni che utilizzano metodi molto chiari. Io midiverto a fare questo.
Nude Americaby Leslie KrimsAs a kid, I made snapshots with my mother’s inexpensive Ansco camera. I’d take the negatives to a small, sour smelling camera shop a fewblocks away to be developed and made into prints. Making any sort of picture appealed to me. To encourage this, my mother bought a smallset of oils for me. There were also brushes, turpentine, canvas board, paper, charcoal sticks and pencils. At age 12, I made a copy of one ofVincent van Gogh’s portraits of Augustine Roulin. It wasn’t until graduate school, in 1965, that I bought my frst 35mm camera (a Nikon),and began to use photography to make pictures. After graduating from a science high school in New York called Stuyvesant High School, Iintended to study architecture. In 1960, I entered the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Art and architecture studentstook similar courses the frst year. I switched my major to art. In the following three years I studied painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing,calligraphy, art history, and design, while commuting back and forth to the small apartment in Brooklyn, where I lived with my mother.After receiving my degree from Cooper Union, I worked for a few months doing paste-up and layout for an art magazine in Manhattan. InDecember of 1965, intending to major in printmaking, I entered Pratt Institute. However, in my firstsemester at Pratt, in addition to paintingand making prints, I took a photography course and bought a Nikon. I showed photographs for my graduate exhibition. Throughout thoseyears all many areas of art made a strong impression and infuenced the photographs I began to make. I haven’t traveled much. I did spend amonth in Tokyo, during the summer of 1975. Spent a week in Arles, in the South of France, about 30 years ago. I’ve been to Vigo, in Spain;and visited Paris twice. When I was a teenager my father lived in California, then moved to Las Vegas, where he lived for 19 years. In the1950’s, I’d leave New York to spend summers with my father in California, or Las Vegas. These trips helped me gain perspective. I beganmore clearly to see and appreciate the great variety of life and opinion America offered. Manhattan was not the center of the universe.Someof the pictures I’ve made are allegories-fractured fairy tales is another way to describe them. Most are best understood as images meant tofascinate. William Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress,” shows us a world in eight engravings; “A Marxist View…” for example, attempts to offer acomplex entertainment in one picture.My work often antagonized activist leftist critics and photographers. It satirized their politics, ideas,and approach to making pictures. But I’m not an “activist photographer” (at least as I understand what that means). American photography,circa 1965, was most often documentary, “socially concerned.” The ideas of Mao and Marx were more important to photographers thanthose of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. I’m a moderate Republican, and was once a registered Democrat. Beginning in the 1930’s,this kind of politicized activist photography was used, directly and indirectly, to promote various huge social engineering projects, and wasoften virulently anti-capitalist. Other approaches were not considered PHOTOGRAPHY. Through the 1960’s, photography hadn’t changedmuch. Photographers did not go to art school. Painters did not consider photography to be art. Into the 1970’s, many curators and galleryowners did not consider photography to be art. Photography was categorized as “old paper”- a term used in the antiques trade. Only ahandful of museums in the United States had collections of photography not merely incidental to their main collections. My work, and thatof a few others, helped establish a new direction. What we did displaced traditionalist, activist photography. These things often happenin the world of art. It is hard to account for taste or fashion. One always pays a dear price for poking fun at the left in American culture.In a country never ravaged by totalitarians, leftist activists still control the arts and humanities in academe, which they infiltated after therevolution they attempted in the late 1960’s failed. Those academics are perennially snide, petulant, dyspeptic, cutthroat, and vindictive.They use ad hominen attack, treating their critics as enemies in a war, seeking their annihilation. My pictures have always been betterreceived in Europe than the U.S., though they are sometimes misunderstood in Europe as criticizing America. A more accurate assessmentis that some satirize the work of a misguided, elitist group of American intellectuals and artists. Digital printing is the most liberatingtechnological development since Gorge Eastman’s invention of roll flm. I love the control one has in creating a in Photoshop. To be honest,I wasn’t a big fan of working in the darkroom, though I embraced it enthusiastically in my own idiosyncratic manner. The offset works Ipublished from time to time were also interesting to me, but very expensive to produce. In the last ten years digital printing and printershave been perfected. In a one-room apartment it is now possible to make giant, high resolution, archival, beautiful prints without disturbingthe neighbors, which once required a four color press as large and noisy as a bus. It seemed clear to me that Marx’s revolutionary notionof workers owning the means of production had come to pass. But it was capitalism, not socialism, which made the revolution possible,making photo-quality printers a commodity. Of course, refrigeration was and is much more important than digital printing to normal people,and saves more lives.Working with nudes is nothing new; photographing one’s mother nude was. In the mid-1960s, the feminist and sexualliberation movements were beginning. As a naïve young man who had lived at home until my second year of graduate school, making myway through those interesting times was not easy. I literally began at home. Photographing my mother as my frst model insured a respectfulrelationship to my models. This has never varied. Radical feminist activists, such as Andrea Dworkin, hated men, and often had no children.The strong bond between a simple hard working woman and her son bewildered and angered these embittered women. My work was oftenattacked. I became a scapegoat for that movement. The left’s politically correct stronghold in the academic photography community inthe States was, and is, The society for Photographic Education.My most recent pictures attempt to show that “texts” can hammer mostany picture’s meaning into a politically useful shape. If I do this adroitly, standard disingenuous, hypocritical, absurd, and irritating leftistmessages are deconstructed, their methods made transparent. It’s fun to do.
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01. Pretending to Comfort 17. The Dollar Family 34. Italian Easter Breads1966, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.02. Nudes & Smart Baby 18. String Distortion 35. Little People, Dachstund Trick1968, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1971, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.03. The Static Electric Effect of Minnie 19. Ritual washing 36. Nude, Airflow Test AreaMouse On Mickey Mouse Balloons 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1971, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.Rochester, New York, 1968, vintage,cm 25x20 ca. 20. Nude with Levitatine Cardboard 37. Do it with a Lewyt Lightning Bolt 1971, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.04. Masked Pregnant Woman with Giant Buffalo, New York, 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.Soap Bubble 38. Optical IllusionRochester, New York, 1968, vintage, 21. Local Magician Levitating Oversize Wand 1974, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.cm 20x25 ca. and Young Woman Kitchen, New York, 1970, vintage, cm 20x25 ca. 39. Optical Illusion. Variation #305. Hairdryer, Projections, Nudes 1974, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.1968, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 22. Local Magician Levitating Young Woman and Fanned Deck of Common Playing Cards 40. Japanese, Nude, Inflated Condom06.Two Liberal Feminists Flexing Behind Buffalo, New York, 1970, vintage, cm 20x25 ca. 1974, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.a Gay Man (David, Daisy, and Leslie)Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, 1968, 23. Nude in Blackface #3 41. Tokyo Grab Toysvintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1974, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.07. Fish Tank 24. Nostalgia, Miracle, Shirt 42. Untalented, Radical, Leftist-Feminist,1968, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. Opportunist, Photografems, Riding the Ascending Comet of Postmodernist Twaddle Academic Art08. David Fradin Squeezing Daisy’s Nipple 25. My Mother Sticking-Out Her False Teeth Academic Art1968, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. Brooklyn, New York, 1970, vintage, Buffalo, New York, 1976, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. cm 25x20 ca.09. Chows & Retarded Man with Nose Bleed 43. Baby boobies1968, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 26. Homage to the Crosstar Filter Photograph Buffalo, New York, 1974, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. Buffalo, New York, 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.10. Breverman’s Golf 44. Don Wynn’s Perfect Model Airplanes1968, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 27. Nudes, Deer, Targets, Cripple Blue Mountain Lake, New York, 1978, vintage, 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. cm 25x20 ca.11. Cobweb, Nude1969, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 28. Aphrodite & Kodalith Print Assortment 45. A Marxist View 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 1985, vintage, silver print, cm 25x20 ca.12. + One1969, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 29. Paul Diamond, Nudes and Fire Extinguisher 46. Stilted (from the ongoing series, “The 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. Decline of the Left”)13. Les Krims Performing Aerosol Fiction, 1993, vintage, ink jet print, cm 25x20, ed.25with Leslie Krims 30. Nude in Blackface #2Fargo Avenue, Buffalo, New York, 1969, 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. 47. Money Makersvintage, cm 25x20 ca. 2011, vintage, ink jet print, cm 25x20 ca. 31. Levitating Nude14. Nude Squirting Penises 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. COVER. Fall on Fargo Avenue, Facing the West1969, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. Side Armory 32. Human Being as a Piece of Sculpture Buffalo, New York, 1969, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.15. Ripening Tomatoes & Nude (Screaming Man Fiction)1969, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. Buffalo, New York, 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. BACK COVER. Mom’s Snaps Brooklyn, New York, 1970, vintage,16. On point Pussy Leap 33. Feminist with Wedding Cake cm 25x20 ca.1969, vintage, cm 25x20 ca. Buffalo, New York, 1970, vintage, cm 25x20 ca.
01 02 03 04 05 06 0708 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 09. G. I. Freud 1980, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.IDIOSYNCRATIC 10. Scattered; She Had Any Number of Lines; and a Colored Picture01. …Buffalo Fashion: Watch Your P’s and Jews; True; 1980, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.a Breadline; and an Oxymoron (Big Moron)1979, vintage, cm 40x50 ca. 11. A Touching Picture of Mother and Son; a Man’s Best Friend Is His Model; and Look at the Little Jew with the Camera On Her Shoe02. Dumping Leaves Nothing Buffalo New York, 1980, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.Buffalo, New York, 1979, vintage, cm 40x50 ca. 12. Les Krims Teaches Them to Do It Abe Reles Style: Ice Picks for Kid03. A Test of Exposure, Development, and a Punk Prank Twist; Black Dicks - a New Twist; and a Picture Designed to Piss-Off Danny1979, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.cm Buffalo, New York, 1980, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.04. A New Miracle for Veronica: Healing Krims’ Eye 13. Ménage á Trout; and a Thought for Kid Twist1979, Buffalo, New York, vintage, cm 40x50 ca. Ontario, Canada, 1980, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.05. Kike Camera, and a Distribution of Donald Ducks 14. A Jewish Vase; and a Chinese TortureBuffalo, New York, 1979, vintage, cm 40x50 ca. 1980, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.06. The Stains on Both Sides of My Mattress Labeled; 15. The Wandering Jew…and His Jewmobileand a Testimonial: Side 2: N-Z Buffalo, New York, 1980, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.Buffalo, New York, 1979,vintage, cm 40x50 ca.07. Ten, Dark, Sweet, PondsBuffalo, New York, 1979, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.08. A Trick for Man RayBuffalo, New York, 1979, vintage, cm 40x50 ca.
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