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Table of Contents
Dr Krause, an inspired amateur
Gael Newton AM 2014
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| Gregor Krause, Beach image |
Extract of text in introduction to publication, Garden of the East (link below)
Of greatly under-appreciated significance today is the work of Gregor Krause (1883–1959) who used a small hand-held German camera during a residence in Bali in 1912 to record what seemed to him the idyllic life of the people around him. ‘Everything is beautiful, perfectly beautiful—the bodies, the clothes, the gait, every posture, every movement’, he recalled, ‘nobody even noticed I was taking them’.
His Bali images were sensuous and erotic—perhaps more than he saw but, arguably, not sly and not predominant by number considering his entire output. They reflected the modern nature philosophy and body culture prevalent in Germany in the early years of the twentieth century.
Krause’s Bali work is truly remarkable for its anticipation of the photo-essay format developed first in German illustrated magazines in the 1920s. The First World War intervened, but in 1920 Asian art historian and director of the Folkwang Museum Karl With (1891–1980) published a two volume set, Insel Bali: Land und Volk (Bali: land and people) and Insel Bali: Tanze, Tempel und Feste (Bali: dance, temples and festivals) in the series Folkwang-Verlag on Asian culture.
The set rapidly went to a second edition, a single abridged poorer quality volume in 1922, a revised German edition in 1926 and French translation in 1930. It also captured the attention of numerous artists and writers. The Austrian novelist Vicki Baum who visited the island in 1935 and published her novel A tale of Bali in 1937 was inspired to do so by a set of Krause’s Bali images she possessed.
They were, she wrote, an escape from ‘the horrors my generation was exposed to—war, revolution, inflation, emigration’.Baum acquired the photographs in 1916 presumably, they were in a portfolio Krause was using to find a publisher. Krause published detailed, informed articles and research in Nederlandsch-Indie: Oud en Nieuw, which captured the reportage flow of his work and the look of the modern picture magazine ‘photo-essay’ being developed in the 1920s in Germany.
The photographs in his portfolio on Borneo flora and fauna, published in 1926, are among the finest animal and nature studies of their day. Krause brought the amateur art photographer’s quest for spirit and beauty, in the manner of a number of early twentieth-century photographers like Edward S Curtis (1868–1952) and Robert J Flaherty (1884–1951), to a genre now defined as ethnographic Pictorialism.
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