File Mixtape – Les Krims

Posted by Fabio 10 December 2010

We here at FILE greets December welcome with our new monthly Mixtape, this time from New York based conceptualist photographer Les Robert Krims. He is noted for his carefully arrange fabricated photographs (called “fictions”), various candid series, a satirical edge, dark humor, and long-standing criticism of what he describes as leftist twaddle.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, on August 16, 1942. Krims studied at New York’s Stuyvesant High School. Richard Ben-Veniste (“Benti,” as he was called in home-room at Stuyvesant), famous for prosecuting Richard Nixon, and A.D. Coleman, the former photography critic for The New York Times, were two of Krims’ Stuyvesant classmates. Krims studied art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and Pratt Institute. For the last 42 years he has taught photography, first at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and for the last 40 years at Buffalo State College, where he is a professor in the Department of Fine Arts. In describing his staged pictures, and the parodies of candid journalistic propaganda photographs he makes, Krims said, “It is possible to create any picture one imagines.” Krims’s latest project is a website (leskrims.com) where he sells archival ink jet prints of a wide selection of his pictures. Krims claims new digital printing technology and capitalism make it possible to “own the means of production, rendering moot wall-to-wall delusional Marxist posturing in the culture community.”

Click here to download Mixtape.

www.leskrims.com