I am Kruppa. Sit down, I make your picture
This is the part where I'm supposed to give you my cv or talk about my half-baked philosophy of photography or tell you how much I love what I do. If you've looked at my work you've already figured that out on your own, so what I'm going to give you here is a story.
Born in Visegrád, Hungary, I ran away from home at age 13 and made my way to Paris because I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. Having accomplished that -- it's pretty big, you can't miss it -- I lived on the streets for several weeks before I was taken in by a German cabaret performer who called herself Eva (her real name was Marlene). In exchange for food and a warm place to stay, I ran errands for her and washed her stockings, and she taught me the places to go (and not to go) in Paris
It was during this time that I stole my first camera, a Minolta XD11 35mm SLR. I liked the look of it in the pawn shop near where I lived with Eva (I've always suspected it was pawned by an American tourist, or better yet, was stolen from an American tourist and pawned by the original thief), and finally, after passing it a hundred times, I gave in to my impulses. I waited one day until the owner was in the back room, walked into the shop, tucked the camera into my coat and walked out.
By the kind of coincidence that only happens in stories like these, Eva's father had been a photographer in Germany after the war, using what she always reminded me was a superior Leica SLR. Her father, Karl, had drilled into her head the fundamentals of exposure, how ISO, aperture and shutter speed worked together, and told her repeatedly "Licht is alles" -- light is everything. She said he didn't want her to follow in his vocation so much as he wanted an audience, but given everything he taught her, she probably could have been a pretty good photographer if she hadn't dedicated herself to three floor shows nightly and a matinee on Sundays.
Instead, she drilled everything into my head that he drilled into hers. She took me to museums and made me sit in front of paintings to study them. She told me to look at the light as we walked around the streets of Paris at sunset. She instructed me to look through the viewfinder without taking a picture. She taught me to use only warm water when hand washing her stockings, because they were silk.
My first photos were portraits of Eva, then later her friends in the cabaret. In time, as my work improved, the cabaret owner started using my photos for advertisements. I gradually began to do portraits for pay and small magazines started to publish my work. I hired someone to wash Eva's stockings. I was doing pretty well.
Then one day I went out for lunch, carrying my Minolta as I did in those days just in case I saw something I wanted to shoot. I walked for a while after I ate, only looking, not taking any photos, then headed back in the direction of Eva's flat. I couldn't get very close, though, as there were fire trucks everywhere. I watched as the building we lived in burned to the ground, along with my negatives and my prints. They told me Eva wasn't in there, but I never saw her again.
After that I decided I wanted to get away from Paris, from France, from Europe altogether, and I thought America was far enough and foreign enough that it would do the trick. So I used the money I'd saved up, caught a plane and hit the States. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I am now in the least American city in America: New Orleans, where I often turn a corner and stumble into a sidewalk café, or drift into a block of tell-tale architecture, or walk by a small bar and hear French chanson. There are moments when it's like I never really got away at all. But there's no Eva now, and no stockings to wash. Just cameras. And lots and lots of pictures.
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Most of the above, of course, isn't true, except for the parts that are. The point of my little fiction is this: imagination is key. These days, after all, anyone can take a pretty picture.
Which, I suppose, is my half-baked philosophy of photography. Welcome to my website.