Leslie Robert Krims was born in New York City in 1942. He has a pioneered a style in which the photographer goes beyond his role as image technician to be his own artistic director and set designer as well. For more than thirty years, Krims has demystified all sorts of American stereotypes, devaluing religious and sexual taboos and mocking the culture of consumerism and leisure. Profoundly baroque, exuberant and prolific, Les Krims saturates pictorial space and flirts with the limits of the acceptable. Tireless in his quest for experimentation, in 1975 he also invented the Fictocryptokrimsograph, a form of polaroid reworked during the drying process. His universe is composed of surrealistic and provocative tableaux vivants, inhabited by electric Minnies, dwarves and iconoclastic symbols, all permanently questioning our perception. He even went so far as to have his own mother pose naked. Mocking, corrosive, he ridicules our founding myths and feeds the controversy that nourishes him. Among his vast œuvre, the three best known conceptual series are The little people of American, "The Deerslayers," and The Incredible Case of the Stack o' Wheats Murders".
Recent exhibitions
2005 : Nues & Nus (group), Musée Municipal Eglise Saint Nazaire, Bourbon Lancy, France 2004 : Center of Things: A Tribute to Harold Jones (group), Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 2004 : Enthüllt (group), Städtische Museen Heilbronn, Heilbronn, Allemagne 2004 : Les Krims, Fact or Fiction (one man), The Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, 2004 : La Collection M+M Auer, une Histoire de la Photographie (group), Musée d'art et d'histoire, Genève 2004 : Street Credibility, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2003 : Venus in Furs, Neue Galerie am Landsmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Autriche 2004 : Global Village : The 60s, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal 2004 : The F.C. Gundlach Collection, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Allemagne 2002 : HEXENWAHN, Ängste der Neuzeit, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Allemagne 2002 : The Photographers Edge, Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinatti 2002 : REVELATION: Representations of Christ in Photography, Hotel de Sully, Paris; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel 2002 : Les Krims, Forum de l'Image, Toulouse 2002 : The Peter C. Bunnell Collection, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton 2001 : Photographs for Sick Kids, The Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh, Ecosse 2000 : Making Light : Wit and Humor in Photography, The Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie 2000 : Le nu photographié, Galerie d'Art du Consul Général des Bouche-du-Rhone, Aix-en-Provence
