Light and Color: Photography of Ann Rhoney and Ingar Krauss

Light and color are essential elements in the works of Ann Rhoney and Ingar Krauss, who combine photography with painting by applying oils directly to their gelatin-silver prints. Though their approaches are similar in that they unite the two mediums, each artist’s spiritual insight and sensitive investigation of the nature of light and color is deeply personal. For both Rhoney and Krauss, the end result is a unique vision and a masterful work of art.

Since the mid-1970s, Ann Rhoney (b. 1953, Niagara Falls) has created works of art that marry the light of photography with the colors of painting. Her tenacious questioning of the camera’s ability to register the nuances of color seen by the human eye recalls that of Josef Albers, who wrote in Interaction of Color (1963) that “color photography deviates still more from eye vision than black-and-white photography. Blue and red are overemphasized to such an extent that their brightness is exaggerated. Though this may flatter public taste, the result is a loss in finer nuances and in delicate relationships.” The rich blacks and silvers of Rhoney’s darkroom prints recall photography’s etymology as “drawn light.” By applying transparent paint to the surface of the print, she fulfills photography’s promise of true luminosity, and reveals a dazzling spectrum of blues, pinks, and grays unattainable in traditional color photography. Rhoney’s obsessive pursuit of light and color has produced artwork as much technically proficient as emotionally gripping. The catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2012 exhibition Faking It wrote of "Silk Dress Coming," “…the silver dress undulates like molten steel, and its carefully positioned streaks of rust and lavender rhyme with those of the admirer’s übermasculine conveyance. The chromatic affinities allowed Rhoney to propose a narrative relationship to which the ‘natural’ color of commercially available film would have been indifferent.”

Born in East Berlin in 1965, Ingar Krauss worked as a psychiatric caregiver before turning to photography in the mid-1990s. From the start, Krauss was drawn to portraiture. His subjects have included his daughter and her friends in the Oderbruch countryside in eastern Germany; children living in state-run orphanages and juvenile prisons in the former Soviet Union; and the Eastern European migrant workers who travel hundreds of miles to Germany every year for seasonal fruit and vegetable harvests. In the introduction to Krauss’s book, Portraits (Hatje Cantz, 2006), Vince Aletti writes that Krauss “has produced a remarkable group of images that balance historical resonance with contemporary relevance… The portraits are understated, unsentimental, and as straightforward as official documents, but they also have an extraordinary emotional weight and clarity.”