A Salute to the Masters: R.I.P. (A Tribute to George Krause)

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This article is dedicated to the multifaceted American photographer George Krause and to his series depicting funeral monuments realized between 1962 and 1963. I was able to know about this series thanks to an important essay on photography written by former Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Director of Photography, John Szarkowski. For this tribute, I loaded my trusty Praktica camera with a roll of Ilford film and took a series of photos in the Monumental Cemetery in my city, Como. Take a look!

I discovered the great American photographer George Krause thanks to this photo. It belongs to his series Qui Riposa which I found in the book, The Photographer’s Eye by former Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Director of Photography, John Szarkowski. It was also in this book that I discovered the French photographer Serge Moulinier.

Born in 1937 in Philadelphia, Krause studied painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography at the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA). After a two-year service in the U.S. Army from 1957 to 1959, he devoted himself entirely to photography. His reportage featured a wide range of topics including the segregated communities of South Carolina, monuments, religious statues, and nudes. His photos are present in the collections of the most important museums around the world, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Credits: sirio174

Speaking about his series Qui Riposa, Krause wrote on his official website:

“My father died before my second birthday and I grew up with a pervading sense of my own mortality. The fear was intensified when my mother would tell me, in anger, that I was stubborn and willful like my father; and like him, I would leave home at sixteen and be dead at the age of twenty-five. I did leave home at sixteen and at twenty I began to work on this cemetery series with the certainty that I had only five years left to live. On my twenty-sixth birthday I visited my mother and told her how relieved I was to have outlived the Krause curse. She thought for a moment and said – Actually your father was twenty-seven when he died.”

Credits: sirio174

For this tribute, I chose a series of photos taken in the Monumental Cemetery of Como: commemorative graves of soldiers who died in the war, sculptures of famous people and tombs of rich families, the grave of a young swimmer who died prematurely, and even sparsely visited small ossuaries (or small burial niches containing the ashes of cremated people) located near a lateral wall of the cemetery.

Credits: sirio174

Among all the graves that I photographed, there is one that touched me. The sculpture in the third photo in the set above represents the synchronized swimming champion, Valentina Musso, who died tragically in a car accident at the age of 21. She is portrayed in the sculpture as emerging from the water. I want to think that this is the water of life, the water of resurrection. I want to think of her swimming in the crystal clear waters of paradise. R.I.P., Valentina, I want to tell you that I love to swim a lot, just as you did and continue to do in the afterlife.

Credits: sirio174

A Salute to the Masters is a series dedicated to great photographers that I like. I posted other tributes for Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Ernst Haas, Stephen Shore, Gabriele Basilico, Robert Adams, Thomas Struth, J.H. Lartigue, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, Gianni Berengo Gardin, André Kertész, Willy Ronis, Brassaï, Rodchenko, Dan Graham, Henry Grant, William Eggleston, Dennis Stock, Juergen Teller, Martin Parr, Peter Mitchell, Mario Giacomelli, David Burnett, Michael Williamson, Bernard Cahier, Harry Gruyaert, Bruno Barbey, Paul Strand, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lothar Rübelt, David Goldblatt, Henry Cartier-Bresson, Raymond Depardon, Aaron Siskind, Mario de Biasi, Sabine Weiss, Jack Delano, Bill Eppridge, Édouard Boubat, Serge Moulinier, Robert Doisneau and Izis Bidermanas. I especially love street photography and urban architectural photography.

written by sirio174 on 2015-06-20 #lifestyle #cemetery #regular-contributor #a-salute-to-the-masters #george-krause #qui-reposa

2 Comments

  1. alex34
    alex34 ·

    Great series!

  2. lomodesbro
    lomodesbro ·

    wonderful work and interpretation

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