Nude with Balloon

Les Krims, artist

born 1942

Nude with Balloon, 1969

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: gelatin silver print (Kodalith)

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 12.9 x 19.3 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 5 1/16 x 7 5/8 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 16 x 20 in

Credit line: Museum purchase

Accession number: 1970.0064

Not on display

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Soundings

“Sparking a strong emotion in myself is one indicator a picture works. If I don’t get a kick out of an image I’ll never use it.”—Les Krims
Curators can similarly get a kick out of juxtaposing images. Krims’s staged photographs of nude women and Kenyon Cox’s careful figure study (below) would seem to have no relation to each other, not in medium, nor in generation or purpose. However, they do share a curious subject—a nude woman, standing erect and holding an object before her—and each is a carefully staged image with no reliance on chance effects. In Krims’s case that artful composition is an intentional rebuke to the casual nature of street photography that dominated critical attention in the 1960s and ‘70s. During a long teaching career at Buffalo State College he conveyed the principle of such staged imagery to his students, most notably photographer Cindy Sherman. CCE