For over two decades artist Bruce Cratsley has produced a personal, and highly poetic body of work with the dominant theme being the mysteries of light and shadow. Cratsleys images of inanimate objects, urban street scenes, and portraits of friends and lovers, possess a metaphysical peculiarity. Whether it be Cratsleys haunting streets of Paris or New York, or light falling onto and through a window, we are often reminded of Eugne Atget, Andr Kertsz, or Cratleys mentor and friend, Lisette Model. But Cratleys personal aesthetic is moored to contemporary concerns, issues of the spirit and mortality. Having been struck by AIDS, Cratsleys work of the previous ten years possesses greater immediacy. His intimate approach to the portrait, reminds us again of lifes ultimate potential, and fragility. Although they have a quality uniquely their own, these pictures call to mind the work of Peter Hujar, another guru, as well as that of David Armstrong. This definitive retrospective monograph encompasses the period 1976 through 1996, and includes representative images from every genre Cratsley pursued.
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Cratsley studied with Lisette Model, and shows the influence of Andre Kertesz, but his work evokes for me that sense of mystery in the everyday I associate most directly with Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Like Meatyard, Cratsley works exclusively in black and white with the twin-lens reflex camera, and uses the solidity and formality of the square format as a calm container for his imagerys visual nuances and emotional undercurrents. And, like Meatyard in another way, Cratsley works under the constraints of time: Meatyard spent his last years battling cancer, while Cratsley lives with AIDS. Yet, in Cratsleys case as in his predecessors, the images feel anything but death-obsessed; they radiate a philosophical acceptance of mortality, and a quiet resignation to the inevitable loss of what one has loved the most, but also a deep affection for the physical world and a determination to cherish those small, mundane epiphanies life offers so generously to those who, like Cratsley, have learned to pay close attention. -- A. D. Coleman, Photography in New York, March/April 1998
About the Author
Bruce Cratsley (1944-1998) was a consummate New Yorker and participant in that citys art scene throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Cratsley held several positions as a curator and gallerist before dedicating himself entirely to photography. In the early 1970s he befriended Peter Hujar who encouraged him to pursue art, and later in 1972 he studied with Lisette Model (1906-1983) at the New School for Social Research. Cratsleys work is in numerous private and institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Bibliothque National, Paris.
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