Graces Mews presents Fictcryptokrimsographs, a series of Polaroid prints created between 1974 and 1975 by American artist Les Krims.

Les Krims’ (b. 1942, Brooklyn, NY) work has consistently challenged the conventions of photographic truth through elaborate staging, satire and dark humour. Rejecting the authority traditionally granted to documentary photography, his practice—often controversial—foregrounds artifice, theatre and the imaginative possibilities of the medium. Frequently featuring disquieting representations of the female body, Krims draws on the visual language of American advertising, popular culture and domestic life to expose the absurd, grotesque and psychologically charged tensions underlying everyday imagery.

In Fictcryptokrimsographs, Krims pushes staged photography into a hybrid territory where performance, psychedelia, collage and surrealism collide. The series reads as a vivid capsule of a moment when photography intersected with the experimental energies of performance, counterculture, and conceptual art. Using Polaroid - a medium often associated with immediacy and truth - Krims reveals image-making to be fundamentally malleable. Working with the chemistry of the film, he intervenes during development, manipulating the emulsion so that the photograph becomes materially unstable and expressive. The resulting images form a strange fusion: part performance document, part painterly surface, part visual hallucination.

Krims’ work has been widely exhibited since the late 1960s and occupies an important place within the development of staged and conceptual photography in the United States. His photographs are held in public collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate Gallery, London, Art Institute of Chicago; International Center of Photography, New York; and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, among others. He currently lives and works in Buffalo.