Steve Krasner
looking backward, forward, and all around, August 21, 2015
Micro-Bio
Born in 1949, I grew up in New Jersey. I began taking pictures in my childhood. Arriving to study physics at MIT in 1967, I began studying photography with Minor White and learning to look and see more. Not according to my original plan, I graduated with a BS in Art and Design and continued what would become a 50-year path of social activism, organizing, and work in the hospital, construction, and high-tech worlds of Boston. All that informed my growing sense of photography’s potential but also limited my time for actually making photographs. Over the last few years, I have returned to my old passion for photography and evolved into doing photography full-time.
Why I Make Photographs
I take and make photographs because I enjoy and grow and learn with the focused experience. In my photographs I am drawn to pieces of the world that we often miss for lack of attention; consider the beauty, the surprises, and everything that just doesn’t register when we walk along consumed by yesterday’s work disaster, what to make for dinner, or anything but the here and now. I aim to create images that make us reflect on ourselves and encourage paying attention. Sometimes, that just means something grand and beautiful. Often, I create unrecognizable abstracts that require focused attention to find the feelings, the challenges, the special experience it can bring.
I find that contemplating the stillness captured in a photograph offers both huge advantages and limitations as compared to paying attention as we go through our days in the everyday world. A photograph just sits there waiting for us. I go for that advantage, the insights and the feelings that can come with undistracted attention and no external time limit. But I’ll never give up the dynamism and engagement of waking to the world every day. A portrait cannot be the person who stood in front of the camera; a close-up of seaweed is never the plant in the water. A photo offers a different way to absorb and explore reality and make it easier to see more, but as menus sometimes say, no substitutions allowed.
Recent Exhibitions
Jersey City Art and Studio Tour, at Grace Van Vorst Church/Pro Arts Jersey City; 2018
at Downtown Yogurt; and at The Studio on Bay Street
Watchung Center for the Arts, ProArts Group Project 2018
Hob’arts/ProArts Jersey City, Dialogue Show 2018
Cambridge Art Association, Captured Moments 2018
Rotunda Gallery, Degrees of Abstraction, Jersey City 2018
Rotunda Gallery, Small Series, Jersey City 2018
Drawing Rooms, Somewhere Over the Interconnected Rainbow & Prospero’s Grand St Masque, Jersey City 2018
Art House, 14-Story Group Show, Jersey City 2018
Drawing Rooms, Big Small Show, Jersey City 2017
Jersey City Art and Studio Tour, at Grace Van Vorst Church 2017
Drawing Rooms, Big Small Show, Jersey City 2016
Jersey City Art and Studio Tour, at Canco Lofts 2016
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©2017-2019 Stephen F. Krasner / Big Toe Images. All Rights Reserved. Nothing in this website may be copied, downloaded, or used for any commercial or other purposes, in any medium existing now or in the future, without the express written permission of the copyright holder. For information about use, purchase, or other issues, please feel free to contact me at steve@bigtoeimages.com.