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Oracle Lens The of the GEORGE KRAUSE From left: George Krause's Stairs, Columbia, South Carolina, 1961; Swish, Rome, 1979; White Horse, Maine, 1963; Shadow, Spain, 1964. All images courtesy the artist and PDNB Gallery, Dallas. THE FIRST PRIX DE ROME RECIPIENT FOR PHOTOGRAPHY, MOMA ARTIST, DOUBLE GUGGENHEIM WINNER AND MINER OF VISIONS, RENOWNED PHOTOGRAPHER GEORGE KRAUSE IRRATIONALLY LANDS IN TEXAS — WIMBERLEY, TO BE EXACT — AND OPENS HIS RANCH HOUSE AND STUDIO. CATHERINE D. ANSPON ENVISIONS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY JENNY ANTILL. A drape of diaphanous fabric swished in a graceful arc over the back of a beautiful nude, a girl in an old-fashioned dress and straw hat ascending a flight of steps, a young African-American boy luxuriating in a column of cascading water, an old crooked woman who casts an ominous shadow against a white stone wall, European grave markers bearing photographs imprinted with the spirit of the deceased, a man grasping a gargantuan tortoise with only his hairy legs and bare feet visible, a sculpture of a saint that you swear blinked peeking from a cathedral portal, large-format portraits where the sitter is enveloped in a white light that makes their features resemble a topological map and, finally, three-dimensional figures that channel saints and martyrs and exist in our time as well as the distant, distant past. These are just a few of George Krause's most seminal images — photographs that crawl into our subconscious and are as indelible and haunting for all who know them as the Mona Lisa or Night Hawks are for audiences of great paintings. Founder of the department of photography at the University of Houston (1975), Krause's five-plus decades career began with a big break in 1964, when he was exhibited at MoMA in a five-person show at the tender age of 26. Fame, fortune, a Prix de Rome (the first ever awarded to a photographer), two Guggenheims, three NEA grants and a Texas Artist of the Year followed for this fearless, evocative and bold photographer who can summon both emotion and the inexplicable with a lens and viewfinder. Best of all, this talent resides in our midst. Enter the kingdom of Krause, sited on a hillside in Wimberley, Texas. In the beginning … The George Krause Hardware Store, 1833 to 1967. My father, George the IV, was a wanderer and an artist. The family business, the George Krause Hardware Store in Lebanon, Pennsylvania — where one could buy almost anything from guns to toys and electric refrigerators to boats (a prototype of the department stores that were to follow) — celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1933. It was assumed and expected that young George IV would continue the royal line. Instead of attending Brown University, as had the other George Krauses one through three, he rode the rails in boxcars with fellow hobos, down to Mexico. There he managed to survive by drawing/sketching the natives in exchange for something to eat and a place to sleep. Then ill and exhausted, he would pull himself onto a train headed north and appear at the door of Red Gables, the family mansion, an unrecognizable stranger, to be nursed back to health. The last hardware store still stands empty in the heart of Lebanon, and I have a copy of the 1933 Lebanon Daily News with 20 pages devoted to the history of the George Krause Hardware Company, including tributes from many other companies, among them DuPont and JC Penney. NOVEMBER | PAGE 70 | 2012 How I came to be in Houston, before Wimberley. My first wife, Patsy, was from Darlington, South Carolina. After my two-year tour of duty in the army, I returned to Philadelphia, where she joined me. She was not happy there or in Yardley, a small lovely town in Bucks County. She wanted desperately to return to the South. As I had recently begun teaching photography in and around Philadelphia, I put the word out that I was looking for a teaching position in the South. There were many offers, and amazingly two were for positions in North Carolina. When I told my wife the good news, she became very depressed. She explained to me that North Carolina was not the South. Angered, I asked what in her mind was the South. "San Antonio and New Orleans" was her quick response. She had served as a WAF and had been stationed at two bases in those cities. A few months later at party in Philadelphia, I met up with a former teacher from my days at the Philadelphia College of Art. When he asked how things were going, I told him the above sad story. He informed me that he was now the chair of the art department at the University of Houston and that Houston was halfway between San Antonio and New Orleans. Would I be interested in coming to Houston to create a photography program? Yes, I said. Patsy, our two young children and I moved to Houston in 1975.