Ingar Krauss

Ingar Krauss was born in East-Berlin in 1965. He lives and works in Berlin and in Zechin a village in the so called Oderbruch riverscape near the Polish border where he has his studio. After learning a trade, completing his military duty and many years as a psychiatric caregiver, he turned to photography in the mid-nineties. Invar Krauss works in picture cycles centering around portraiture. He became known with pictures of children and adolescents, who he portrayed in a melancholic-meditative manner. In the series „Migrant Workers“ or portraits of adolescent prisoners in Russia he shows strong empathy for his models. Since 2010 he is working on a series of still lives that can be seen as portraits of natures mortes. These still lives reflect his new working method, which is influenced by an interest in materiality and surface feel. To arrange his still lives he constructs stage-like boxes in which he captures natural light so it becomes a subtle co-actor in his quiet drama. He projects and develops his black and white photographs on a matt silver gelatin paper and manually reworks these prints with a glaze of oil-based paint.