George Krause's photographs have consistently illuminated the balance between the temporal and the heavenly. Moving between his sharp sense of the ordinary and the fantastic he has used his camera to mirror man's continuing struggle with the opposing pulls of the worldly and the spiritual. It is this tension that electrifies his photographs.
Particularly in Saints & Martyrs, Krause finds the perfect ground on which to challenge our most intelligent assumptions about reality - photographic or otherwise. The realistically sculpted figures, which we know to be symbols crafted of wood and plaster, are felt, in the pictures to be intimately mortal - so relentlessly human, in fact, that they are almost unbearble. Krause releases the spiritual depths in his subjects so that they are no longer mere emblems of sacrifice and martyrdom. He allows them their own authority, their individual power of expression, their specific pain or ecstasy.
Krause does not submit to the iconography imposed by the Catholic Church, iconography intended by the sculptors to evoke fear in the suppliant sinner. Instead, he isolates each figure from its conventional setting and draws on our ability and desire to identify with each statue. In doing so, he divests us of our comfortable knowledge of the social and cultural motives behind these works of art, and we are forced to confront naked emotions. While we remain respectful of the effects achieved by the sculptors, the photographer leaves us alone to confront, and be confronted by, each personality molded by centuries of myth and brought painfully up to date.
Carole Kismaric
NYC, 1976