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George Krause
was born in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1937 and received his training at
the Philadelphia College of Art. He has had more than fifty
one-person exhibitions and has participated in over one hundred
group shows at galleries and museums here and abroad. 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 Bibliotheque 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.
"He
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 thesurrealism 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."
- From the
introduction by Mark Power
His
photography is best viewed here at
800 X 600, True Color.
Set your display, and prepare to enjoy!
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