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.