THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY!

"It is undeniably thrilling to discover something that I never expected to find in a photograph. Whether visually or symbolically hidden in plain sight, I delight in that “aha” moment of realization. Such treats abound in exhibits featuring Greg Heins, Bruce Cratsley, Jason DeMarte and the duo known as “pwmd”, now at Gallery Kayafas in Boston’s SoWa arts district through December 9th, 2017. Indulge yourself!

Bruce Cratsley (1944-1998) was known for his mastery of light and shadow. His square-format B&W images reveal poetic fragments of his daily life and acclaim the ethereal in the everyday. Deep shadows, ghostly reflections, blurred motion and sometimes even smoke or mirrors imbue his photographs with mystery. Intimate Light includes fifteen vintage, small-scale prints, some on view for the first time, in an expertly curated installation by gallery assistant Lee Wormald. The images convey both transience and awe, whether in Cratsley’s elusive reflection in a shop window or the buoyant luminosity of a New Year’s balloon. Cratsley’s intimate and sensuous photographs are radiant allusions to our impermanence." - Elin Spring, What Will You Remember

Art galleries: Lyrical Cratsley; Abstract artists in two directions

A few years before he died at 53 of complications from AIDS, the New York photographer Bruce Cratsley (1944-98) had an urge to photograph Paris one last time. He was in poor health, suffering from a worse-than-usual bout of fatigue, and barely able to carry his luggage. So his friend Sherry Suris recalled in the monograph Bruce Cratsley: White Light, Silent Shadows. Still, he managed to fly home with more than 600 images, "some among the most lyrical of his career," Suris wrote.

Cratsley was already admired for his moody black-and-white portraits and still lifes shot with his battered, early 1950s twin-lens Rolleiflex. They had been shown in one-person exhibitions at several prominent New York photography galleries and in a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1996. "This sampling of two dozen photographs is a small one," wrote New York Times art critic Holland Cotter, "but it confirms the thematic breadth and emotional depth of this artist's work over 20 years." Cratsley was also known for a more exuberant body of work: documentary photographs of New York's annual Gay Pride March; and Wigstock, the outdoor drag festival (the New York Public Library holds an archive of more than 1,200 prints of it, spanning the early 1980s to the early 1990s.)

Now, Swarthmore College is honoring Cratsley, a 1966 graduate who later attended New York's New School for Social Research, where he studied with photographer Lisette Model.

A survey of prints from each of Cratsley's various bodies of work has been organized for Swarthmore's List Gallery by gallery director Andrea Packard and photographer Ron Tarver, an instructor of art at Swarthmore.

"Bruce Cratsley: Shifting Identities" is tidy - with 35 prints, only slightly larger than Cratsley's Brooklyn Museum of Art show - but it quickly reveals the photographer's ability to use the play of shadow and light on people, places, and objects to evoke the ephemerality of life. His appreciation for the work of his mentor, Model, and for the photographs of Eugène Atget, Diane Arbus, and W. Eugene Smith is also readily apparent in this broad selection, which also includes a few of his Gay Pride March and Wigstock pictures.

Cratsley referred to his photographs as "snapshots, really, but carefully made." Here, that applies equally to such seemingly disparate images as fireworks bursting over the Brooklyn Bridge, a mannequin in a Barney's window, and Cratsley's AIDS-stricken partner, David Waine, lying in bed, smiling, and embracing a passel of stuffed animals.

In many ways, and certainly in this exhibition, Cratsley's work could be considered a time capsule of two decades as seen through the lens of a gay man watching his friends vanish and knowing he will likely succumb to the same scourge. In the face of AIDS, Cratsley looked for humanity everywhere he turned his camera and celebrated its poetry.

On Wednesday, Oct. 19, List Gallery associate Jasmin Rodriguez-Schroeder, of the Swarthmore Class of 2017, will give a talk about Cratsley's work. Copies of an exhibition brochure written and designed by List Gallery intern Blake Oetting will be distributed free of charge.

Through Oct. 30 at List Gallery, Swarthmore College, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore. Hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Information: 610-328-7811 or www.swarthmore.edu/list-gallery.

By Edith Newhall, Contributing Art Writer

Bruce Cratsley: Shifting Identities

For Immidaite Release:
Bruce Cratsley: Shifting Identities
September 8–October 30, 2016

The List Gallery, Swarthmore College, is pleased to present Bruce Cratsley: Shifting Identities, a survey of photographs taken by Bruce Cratsley between 1977 and 1999. Curated by List Gallery director Andrea Packard and Ron Tarver, Instructor of Art at Swarthmore College, the exhibition presents more than 35 masterworks from Cratsley’s varied bodies of work, including still-lifes, portraits, images of fine art, street scenes, and celebrations of gay and lesbian culture. The exhibition will be on view September 8—October 30, 2016. The opening reception will take place in the List Gallery on Thursday, September 15, 5:30-7:00 p.m. Ron Tarver, winner of both a Pew Fellowship and Pulitzer Prize for photography, will deliver a lecture titled “Bruce Cratsley’s Inspirations and Legacy” immediately before the opening reception. The lecture will take place in the Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema, 4:30-5:30 p.m. All events are free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Bruce Cratsley’s black-and-white photographs distill formal and and conceptual lessons from many of the artists he admired, including seminal photographers such such as André Kertesz, Eugene Atget, Diane Arbus, W. Eugene Smith, and, most of all, his teacher, Lisette Model, with whom he studied at the New School for Social Research in New York in the early 1970s. Model described Cratsley as “a poet with a camera” and encouraged him to photograph figures and ordinary objects with both the immediacy of a snapshot and a formal rigor that conveys timeless beauty. His diverse bodies of work reflect his profound engagement with art, architecture, and the surreal contrasts and ephemeral visual encounters he experienced in New York City, where he lived and worked. Swarthmore’s survey exhibition presents a range of Cratsley’s subjects from his nuanced still-lifes and the windblown tendrils of flowering trees to experiences living and working with AIDS during the late 1980s and 1990s.

Primarily using a twin lens medium format Rolleifllex camera and printing his photographs in a square format, Cratsley found ways to relate precise details, texture, and imagery to abstracted geometries of light and shadow. He used velvety blacks, elegant calligraphic lines, and dazzling washes of light to abstract his subjects, questioning fixed assumptions or viewpoints, and imbuing his imagery with mystery and yearning. As the artist wrote “Often I photograph the unseen, things which are not there—sensations and mysteries. There is a presence in absence. My camera work is alchemical, creating a visual poetry of heart, idea, and spirit.” Reviewing Cratsley’s 1996 Brooklyn Museum retrospective in The New York Times, Holland Carter concluded: “whether Mr. Cratsley is setting up a surreal play of glinting reflective surfaces or picking his subjects out from velvety penumbral darkness like jewels on a cushion, the combination of elegance and evanescence that results is his signature.”

Born in 1944, Cratsley grew up in Swarthmore, Pa., and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1966. He began studying with Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research in 1972. For more than a decade, he developed his aesthetic as a curator and gallerist, ultimately serving as director of Graphics and Photography at Marlborough Gallery. In 1986, he left Marlborough to devote himself full-time to his work as an artist. Cratsley exhibited his work at numerous New York galleries, including Howard Greenberg, Laurence Miller Gallery, Witkin Gallery, Yancy Richardson, and Sarah Morthland. Bruce Cratsley: Master of Light and Shadow, the retrospective exhibition mounted by the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1996, was critically acclaimed. Numerous private and institutional collections acquired his work, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Bibliothque Nationale, Paris; Yale University Library; Harvard’s Fogg Museum; and New York Public Library. A monograph on the artist, Light, Silent Shadows, was published by Arena Editions in 1998. He died in 1998 due to complications from AIDS.

We are grateful to Arlette Kayafas, Gus Kayafas and Lee Wormald at Gallery Kayafas, Boston and to the family of Bruce Cratsley for loaning works to this exhibition.  Additional support for the exhibition was provided by the Marjorie Hielman Visiting Artist Fund and the Department of Art, Swarthmore College.

"...we see and think and feel." Photographs by Bruce Cratsley

For Immediate Release
Exhibition: "...we see and think and feel." Photographs by Bruce Cratsley
Dates: September 7 - October 2, 2002.
Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

"Magic is the action and effect of light and love, none of which could exist for us with memory. The truest subject of my photographs is light, the message of my medium is the expression of love, and the sensual and intellectual pleasures our rich lives can provide." Bruce Cratsley

Bruce Cratsley died of AIDS in 1998 at the age of 53. His still lives, portaits and other images illuminating gay and lesbian life are satiated with light and rich shadows revealing an emotional connection, a memory lost... a sense of time passing. As a photographer he worked only in black and white, printing in a formal square format. His photographs do no explore a sadness but rather a strong realistic approach to the inevitability of loss. There is a sensual quiet beauty in his vision of the world; strong relationships, fleeting emotions demonstrate his love and passion for his physical world. Through Cratsley's work, "...we see and think and feel."

Bruce Cratsley, 53, Photographer Of Still Lifes and Gay Life

Bruce Cratsley, a photographer whose subjects ranged from light-soaked still lifes and portraits of friends to celebratory documents of gay and lesbian life in New York City, died on Monday at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. He was 53.

The cause was complications from AIDS, according to Sarah Morthland, an art dealer who is an executor of his estate.

Born David Bruce Cratsley in Canton, Pa., he graduated from Swarthmore College and studied with the photographer Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research in the early 1970's. Working under the name Bruce Cratsley, he had shows at numerous New York galleries, Howard Greenberg, Laurence Miller Gallery and Witkin among them, and was represented at the time of his death by Yancey Richardson Gallery in SoHo.

A retrospective of Mr. Cratsley's photographs (which he referred to as ''snapshots, really, though carefully made'') was mounted by the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1996 to critical acclaim. A monograph on the artist, titled ''White Light, Silent Shadows,'' was published by Arena Editions earlier this year.

For many years Mr. Cratsley documented the annual Gay Pride Parade in New York, as well as the fashion extravaganza known as Wigstock. More than a thousand of his pictures of those events are in the permanent collection of the New York Public Library. His work is also in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and the Bibliotheque National in Paris.

Mr. Cratsley is survived by his companion, William Leight of New York City; his mother, Jane Cratsley, and a brother, John, both of Concord, Mass.

By Holland Cotter

Bruce Cratsley at Wessel + O'Connor Gallery

Bruce Cratsley at Wessel + O'Connor Gallery
By: Rothbart
NY Arts - February 1998. Page 49.

Bruce Cratsley, through February 14th. This retrospective of work by Bruce Cratsley presents forty five photographs taken between the years 1976 and 1995. Cratsley photographed New York City and despite the hardness of his subject, attained a feeling of spatial ambiguity and abstraction that is intriguing and at times quite beautiful. In Grand Central Shadows, an oblique line of men waiting to purchase tickets is presented. Only their legs are visible in the upper register of the photograph and below is a line of shadows cast by people waiting in a parallel line, invisible to the camera. These shadows are cast by the the upper body so, in a curious way, they complete the figures of the waiting legs. The shadows also generate abstract forms that only grudgingly share the composition with concrete particulars of the gentlemen in line. The exhibition presents subtle imagery of a metropolis where men and women cohabit with mannequins and shadows in such a way was to suggest Cocteau's poetic space. 

Art in Review - The New York Times

Bruce Cratsley
'Master of Light and Shadow'
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park
Through Jan. 5

This sampling of two dozen photographs is a small one, but it confirms the thematic breadth and the emotional depth of this artist's work over 20 years.

Like the photographers he most admires, Atget and Lisette Model (with whom he studied), Bruce Cratsley often freezes images of apparently unpeopled urban or natural worlds: the fall of late-day light through a window of the Louvre; a cherry tree blooming on Cape Cod; fireworks bursting over the Brooklyn Bridge.

Each picture reveals the resonant, unsuspected glamour of a particular time and place, and this is true of photographs of human subjects as well. These may be ''portraits'' of sculptures in a museum or of friends at home. But in either case, the sitters, ideal or real, come across as both precious and vulnerable.

This is particularly evident in two images paired by the show's curator, Barbara Head Millstein. One is of an ancient Egyptian stone head, its surface chipped but its expression serene and noble. The other is of the shadowed figure of the photographer's lover lying in bed, his face marked by the ravages of AIDS (from which Mr. Cratsley himself suffers) but softened with a dreamy smile. Indeed, there is something dreamlike about all of this work. And whether Mr. Cratsley is setting up a surreal play of glinting reflective surfaces or picking his subjects out from velvety, penumbral darkness like jewels on a cushion, the combination of elegance and evanescence that results is his signature. HOLLAND COTTER

Shadow and Act Bruce Cratsley's Light Fantastic

Shadow and Act
Bruce Cratsley's Light Fantastic
By: Vince Aletti
The Village Voice - February 27, 1996.

"I'm in a really weird physical and emotional state," Bruce Cratsley says when I call shortly before heading off to visit him, and I'm not surprised. For most artists, it would be nerve-racking enough to have a 20-year retrospective opening in four days (at Yancey Richardson Gallery, 560 Broadway, through March 23). But for Cratsley, who, by his own calculation, has been HIV-postive for "at least 12 years" and not in the best of health for the past few, the show's debut coincides with a mysterious and painful swelling in his right hand that threatens to put him in Beth Israel. In the overstuffed cocoon of his apartment, however, Cratsley doesn't seem at all rattled. Perched by a sunny window, surrounded by his own photographs hung to the ceiling and stored in near boxes everywhere, he looks frailer than his 52 years, but he radiates a wiry, almost mischievous energy. 

Though Cratsley says he began taking photographs when still a child, he's been lively figure in the photo world since the early 70's, when he moved from a job in Magnum's photo library through postions at Witkin, Photograph, and Marlborough galleries, the last as director of graphics and photography. Since leaving Marlborough in 1986, he's concentrated on his own work, which has always been classically modernist, even rather trad, and infused with a lovely melancholy- a psychological play of shadow and light that captures an ephemeral moment with the delicacy of a poem. 

"Ive always been very interested in poetry," Cratsley says, "and I think my approach is very much like a poet writing a poem: You feel very strongly about something and try to describe it. I take a camera and focus on something, usually light. Like the way the sun is falling on your hand now.... I'm very interested in metaphysical things, and light is to me a spiritual medium. It's silly to talk about my late work, but the later stuff is more about light, less and less about subject, more abstract, and it's printed that way, too, with the highlights almost blasted out." Among Cratsley's "late work" are 650 pictures taken last November in Paris, only a very few of which he's been well enough to print (one is in his retrospective, another became his Christmas card). "The trip was good but hard," he says. "I came back drained, to two months of fatigue, HIV distress, various infections. But I'm dying to print those pictures."

In between preparing a show he fears may be his last and struggling with his bum hand, Cratsley has managed to make several new self-portraits. They're the latest in a series going back to his childhood (one of which we've printed here), and they have little to do with vanity of self-satsifaction. Setting a stack of them in my lap, he points out the effects of Bell's palsy visible on a group of Polaroid triptychs and the little bump on his balding head from a medicine-drip implant he had a while back. Diane Arbus's work had "a huge influence," he says, but, like all his photos, the self-portraits owe more to his favorite, Eugene Atget. Thety're not confrontational or blunt; they're luminously matter-of-fact, emotionally understated, elegiac but poignantly alive. 

Bruce Cratsley at Yancey Richardson Gallery

Bruce Cratsley at Yancey Richardson Gallery
By: Charles Hagen
The New York Times - February 23, 1996. Page C32

A charged lightness characterizes the best of Bruce Cratsley's black-and-white photographs, presented here in a 20 year retrospective. Whether depicting grand events or quiet ones, Mr. Cratsley often achieves a delicate emotional balance. A shot of fireworks blossoming over a Venetian canal and one of a hand holding the corner of a white piece of paper both take on an almost meditative equanimity. 

Mannequins, the staple of much Surrealist photography, are a favorite motif. In one picture, a headless model wrapped in what look like bandages hovers in a SoHo store window; in another a row of these anonymous figures, unclothed, turn away from the camera. Some pictures have an eerie sense of life arrested. In a photo taken in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a fragment of an Egyptian statue of a face floats in front of a blurred background; in Paris, a mime in whiteface, wearing a white raincoat and carrying a white umbrella, poses expressionless in a shaft of sunlight. 

The passage of time and photography's ability to step outside it are key elements in these echoing images. Mr. Cratsley's deceptively simple works resonate with sad beauty. 

Bruce Cratsley: Twenty Years

For Immediate Release
Exhibition: Bruce Cratsley: Twenty Years
Dates: February 15 - March 23, 1996

"A contemporary master of light and shadow." Barbra Head Millstein, Curator, Brooklyn Museum

"Pensive and intimate, the recent work of Bruce Cratsley constructs a microcosm in which reservoirs of feeling tremble beneath carefully composed, unruffled surfaces... Yet its underlying message concerns the pleasures, sensual and intellectual, that the world has to offer..." A.D. Coleman, The New York Observer, May 4, 1992. 

The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition of photographs by Bruce Cratsley on view from February 16 through March 23, 1996. The Photographs date from 1976 through 1995 during which time Cratsley has created a highly poetic and personal body of work whose dominate theme has been the mysterious play of light and shadow.

A prolific photographer, Cratsley has never limited himself to a particular subject matter but has sought to capture alchemy achieved by light, shadow, lens and film. His images frequently has a dreamlike character in which inanimate surfaces tremble with life and emotion. "Often I photograph the unseen, things which are not there - sensations and mysteries."

Whether portraits of friends, tabletop arrangements of curious objects, mannequins in street windows, museum interiors or Gay Parade participants in drag, Cratsley's images present an enigmatic and multilayered reality. Particularly in the photographs of inanimate objects and mirrored reflections, one's perception of space and time is made ambiguous. Edward Sozanski, art critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote in his review of Cratsley's 1991 retrospective at Swarthmore College: "All photographs stop time by recording an instant, but Cratsley's go a step further - they record time stopped, and in doing so, they insist on contemplation. One can't glance at his images and move along, one must absorb them. In that sense, they become eternal."