George Krause, “one of our greatest living photographers,” is exhibiting some of the best work of his career at Berlin Bar & Bistro. George is in San Miguel this month preparing a showing of his famous Sfumato Nudes, a sampling of which can be found on his website, www.georgekrause.com.
From the website:
George Krause was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1937 and received his training at the Philadelphia College of Art. He received the first Prix de Rome and the first Fulbright/Hays grant ever awarded to a photographer, two Guggenheim fellowships and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Krause’s photographs are in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In 1993 he was honored as the Texas Artist of the Year.
He recently retired from the University of Houston where he created the photography program and now lives in Wimberley, Texas.
“George will probably tell you his work is about fantasy, and if you ask him about influences he might mention Cartier-Bresson, Strand and Kertesz, influences that are more philosophical than visual.
“If I were a critic, writing about a stranger’s work, I would probably talk about the ‘classicism’ of his work, a formality that seems to bridge the generations of Strand-Weston and Callahan-Siskind to the anti-formal iconoclasm of such photographers as Robert Frank and Bruce Davidson; I would also point out that the fantasy that is so prevalent in most of his photography antedates and complements the surrealism which permeates other contemporary work today.
“But knowing the man, and knowing him before I knew his work, the times seem more important, and his work and those times seem inseparable. His work is like the obverse side of Cartier-Bresson’s coin; his strongest photographs, for me, capture those indecisive moments when man’s persona takes over, moments when the spirit transcends the flesh: girls walking up stairs and changing to Alice-in-Wonderland, doors turning into faces, men metamorphosing into gods, gargoyles stepping off walls, tenuous moments when stone turns to flesh, or flesh to stone, and myth and legend walk among us.”
–Mark Power