Les Krims (1943)

Aliases: Leslie Robert Krims
Professions: Photographer

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Biography

(b New York, 16 Aug 1943). American photographer, teacher and printmaker. He studied at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York (BFA, 1964) and at the Pratt Institute, New York (MFA, 1967), where he also taught photography and printmaking (1966–7). Krims began working as a freelance photographer in 1967 and taught photography at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY (1967–9). From 1969 he was Professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo. In the late 1960s to early 1970s he was prominent in the group of young photographers who devised fictional scenes for the still camera, which were directed and shot in sequence as in films. He assembled the results as small books or boxed portfolios, published by Humpy Press, which he set up c. 1972. He mainly photographed nudes posing in surreal, grotesque or obscene situations. Drawing from advertising, pornography, Pop and Op art, he also created tableaux involving dwarves, mutilated women and even kidnappings, usually set against backgrounds of kitsch living-rooms with spray-painted patterns and eccentric props. Black humour and allusions to political and sexual hypocrisies and racial prejudices abound in his work. In his notorious book of Polaroid prints Fictocryptokrimsographs (1975), naked bodies ooze pink bubble gum in a mêlée of men and women enacting sexual fantasies. He frequently included himself, as well as friends, neighbours and family members, in his work. His colour photography was invariably garish, but he also worked in black and white, as in The Deerslayers (1972), a grimly realistic photo-essay of deer-hunters returning with their kill. In later work Krims increasingly attacked gentrified taste, consumerism and what he called ‘fashionable ideological views’, photographing his models in rooms filled with banners and cheap consumer goods, as in A Marxist View; Bark Art; Art Bark (for Art Park); Irving’s Pens; A Chinese Entertainment; and Brooklyn, Another View (1983–4; San Francisco, CA, MOMA). (hide)