LESLIE KRIMS

Leslie Krims plays an essential role in the history of American photography. For over forty years he has been questioning stereotypes, social movements, religious and sexual taboos of the American consumer society. Through the perspective of his camera, Krims has revealed the weaknesses and the faults of a nation in an ironic and irreverent way.

His figurative universe is composed of surrealist and provocative images, populated by Minnies, gnomes, symbols and iconoclasts, which constantly question our perception, such as immortalizing his own naked mother.  In the mid Sixties his work caused a scandal, that became also political with the intervention a government commission and the withdrawal from a photo contest of the most emblematic photo he realized: “Mom’s Snaps”, a homage to his mother, standing on a chair with portraits of her son attached to her body.

Among hismost famous collections: “The Little People of America” (1971), “The Deerslayers” (1972) and “The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheat Murders” (1972).

“What I did was to laugh at the most radical aspects of a culture. I have enlightened behaviors and extremist tendencies in an absolutely sarcastic way. It’s not surprising that my photographs are more positively accepted in Europe than in the USA, but sometimes not properly understood as a means of cultural criticism. What I have created is pure satire”.