Conceptualistic photography.

 

Leslie Krims

 

Conceptualism:

 

The doctrine, intermediate between nominalism and realism, but universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality. A school of abstract art or an artistic doctrine that is concerned with the intellectual engagement of the viewer through the conveyance of an idea and the negation of the importance of the object itself. An abstract, relating to ideas or qualities rather than physical things.

 

When a French monthly Photo printed a large portfolio of Leslie Krims' pictures in 1975, the public was shocked. The magazine was flooded with protest mail, many of its readers cancelled their subscriptions and a large French company stopped advertising in the magazine. People talked indignantly about sick extremism, others a bit pompously hailed the author as a Bergman or a Fellini of photography. The editors of photo responded by polling aestheticians, art historians, sociologists, critics and even psychiatrists. As a result, Leslie Krims was proclaimed one of the greatest symbolists of our period.

 

Leslie Robert (Les) Krims was born in Brooklyn NY, on August 16, 1942. Krim had grown up in the post-war world of gadgetry and affluence. His world and everything around him felt unacceptable, unreal. His images are a expose of a society where everything is mechanized and the individual is just a preprogrammed assembly with replaceable parts. The reasoning behind his shocking pictures of a dentist's X-ray apparatus eating up the head of a naked woman. Leslie Krims images of a naked body sown by a needle and suture, dentures, masks and diving suithelmets replacing the human head. His images seem to be telling us that everything is artificial.

 

Leslie Krims has published numerous works. Two of these, "Making Chicken Soup" and "Fictcryptokrimsographs". This is a series in which Krims used his own mother as a model. The chicken carcass cut up by a naked woman, elicits an irrepressible feeling that the human beings have become emotionless and senseless, that we are only flesh, that we have become automatons. "Krims felt that "socially concerned" photography was a palliative (making it less severe), just as chicken soup was - in the long run, an ineffective remedy for serious disease.

 

In fictcryptokrimsographs, published in 1975, Krims used a poaroid SX-70 camera to make a series of 40, titles images. He chose the Polaroid SX-70, because of its ability to move the work even if it was not dry yet. It includes various humourous and odd images, which are parodies and puns of fashion trends.

 

His photography, is intellectual, thought-provoking, ironic and scathing and even malicious, it is a passionate protest against life becoming mechanized to the environment and to himself. His images consciously tear down all taboos and shock in order not to be overlooked. His images are of anxiety and self-preservation and not products of of hatred or insanity.

 

Why would he have captured a stiletto heel bearing down on the defenseless body of a white mouse? Why would he want to photographa mother whose body is totally cobered by portraits of her son? Leslie Krims relates to us a fear of our own humanity, a fear that human values are rapidly dying. A desire to reinstate ethics, to re-examine our own societies.

 

Leslie Krims studied art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Pratt Institute. He is a graduate of two New York universities, he is a self-taught photographer. Immediately after graduation he was hired as an assistant in photography at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

 

His images have caused uproar in conservative Europe, but this has changed due a major balance of opinion showing an appreciation to his work. The emotions provoked by Krims ' work ran high is attested by an event in 1971, a young boy of a gallery custodian was kidnapped in Memphis Tennessee. The kidnappers refused to release the boy unless the gallery reinstated four of Krims photographs that had been taken down by the curator because they had been judged as potentially offensive. The boy was returned unharmed and the photographs were returned with the rest of Krims images. Krims had nothing to do with the kidnapping.

 

Anti-porn feminists and feminist photographers have criticized Krims work as being objectifying, fetishistic , body-despising and a misogynist who uses his photographs to humiliate predominantly woman. However, Krims displays captions with his images that place his work in context.

 

In The Incredible Case Of The Stack O'Wheat Murders (1972) Krims both parodies forensic photography, and points to it as a remarkable archive of incredible and moving images. In each "Wheats" crime scene, a Stack O'Wheats (pancakes) is place near each "victim" (Krims used friends and family to pose for the pictures). Upon each stack of pancakes os topped pats of butter and syrup, the number of pancakes in the stake signifying the number of crimes.

 

Diane Arbus Lives in Us is the title of a series of four images in which Krims pays tribute to the photographer who has had the greatest influence on his work.

 

"Anything that comes to one's mind can be expressed photographically.... The greatest potential source of photographic imagery is the mind," he says, adding: 'I'm no historian, I am a maker of history."

 

Please visit Leslie Krims own web site: www.leskrims.com