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