Kris Graves’ photography has taken him from Queens to Iceland, California to the Deep South.
His career has been similarly wide-ranging, from running a gallery to working in one of the world’s great museums, collaborating with iconic brands like National Geographic, and publishing nationally recognized photography books.
His work often serves as a meditation on the ephemeral. “I'm interested in the things that are not here anymore,” he says via Zoom. “I photograph a lot of things that were not temporary for 100 years, 200 years, and now they've become temporary, through gentrification, redlining … At some point, it all becomes historic.”
But all history starts somewhere, and Graves’ begins, in part, on the brick-filled landscape of Purchase College.
“It Felt Right”
Graves grew up on the border of Queens and Long Island in an artistic family. He knew early on that he wanted to pursue a career in the arts and saw photography as a way to not only become an artist but to make a living as one. After one visit he had a sense that Purchase would be the place to help him launch his career.
“The other schools I visited, I was pretty much interviewing with people in offices, like admissions people,” he says. “I didn't learn anything. But with the Purchase interview, I was with a photography professor named Jo Ann Walters … and she actually gave me advice,” he says. “It felt right.”
Looking back he can see the ways the College influenced his style.
“There's a lot of order to the campus,” he says. “How it looked. The professors I was most interested in were doing very constructed work, using cameras that were architectural in focus. It gave me a base for the science of photography, and then I could be creative on top of that base.”
But he didn’t simply leave with knowledge and a degree: Purchase, it turned out, was full of future artistic collaborators.
Staying Connected in New York City
For about three years after graduation, Graves worked as a freelancer while organizing group shows in Chelsea, many of which included members of the Purchase community. “I am still friends with almost every professor [whose classes I took] … Teachers, students, we still keep a little community going, which is good.”
In 2007, he landed a job as a photographer at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Graves took some time away from showing art to dive into his new role and travel—until, ironically, the Great Recession offered an opportunity: a cheap gallery space in Brooklyn. He and his cousin lept at the $1,000 a month rent.
Kris Graves Projects operated out of Dumbo, where it would remain for two and a half years. But while the space was self-sustaining, it was not profitable, and it was this constraint that got Graves thinking about how else he could make and sell art.
“I didn't have friends with money, and I didn't want to cold-call rich people to buy stuff for me,” he says. “The gallery was more about just having shows and being around the community. But I realized really quickly that selling something for $40 to 100 people was much easier than selling something for $1,000.
“The art world [is] an extremely unregulated market where people can do whatever they want,” he continues. “There was no option besides to do it yourself. And to me, I was like, ‘Because there's no order, I can come in here and do what I want.’”
Once again, Graves looked to Purchase alumni to help him realize his vision.
Getting Better Together
His first book, A Queens Affair, was a collaboration with former alumnus Eric Hairabedian ’04 (Visual Arts). Since then, Kris Graves Projects and Monolith—a later imprint that seeks to celebrate, recognize, and uplift BIPOC art—have published more than 100 books. Many of these BIPOC artists also came out of Purchase, either as alumni or faculty, including Andrea Modica ’82 (Visual Arts), Jason Hanasik ’03 (Photography), Luke Abiol ’04 (Visual Arts), Greg Evans ’05 (Visual Arts), Peter Baker ’05 (Liberal Arts), Mercedes Jelinek ’07 (Visual Arts), Marshall Scheuttle ’09 (Visual Arts), Owen Conway ’10 (Photography), Lauren Noel Oliver ’14 (Photography), Giovanni Urgelles ’16 (Photography), and Giancarlo Montes Santangelo ’18 (Photography), as well as Jed Devine, Professor Emeritus of Art+Design, and Sergio Fernandez, former adjunct professor.
Graves sees this as a natural progression of his work as a gallerist.
“With the gallery, I showed a lot of Purchase people,” he says. “Then the first people that I made books with, three out of four of them were from Purchase. And I think with us staying connected, we got better together.”
Publishing is, on every level, about accessibility: it’s a way to sell art, but it’s also a way to make art available to more people. When the books he publishes sell out, the images are archived online for everyone to see. “We try to be good to our community in that way,” Graves notes.
“American Monuments” and National Geographic
Even as Graves dives wholeheartedly and seemingly ceaselessly into his own projects, he continues to freelance. In recent years, he’s contributed to National Geographic. His first three assignments for the iconic outlet were part of a project called “American Monuments.”
“They put me on the road during the middle of COVID, and I went to photograph what I thought was just landscape architecture work of Confederate monuments,” he says. “But it was during the [Black Lives Matter] protests and a lot of stuff was being torn down while I was there, so I could get before-and-afters of [the sites], which is different and immediate.”
Initially, the project was wholly focused in and around Richmond, Virginia. But the outlet soon opted to extend the project to document more Confederate statues in situ before many of them would be removed. Graves worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had mapped such sites on a map, and fellow photographer and Purchase alumnus Marshall Scheuttle ’08. The pair traveled across 4,000 miles and eight states in a month, photographing about 200 monuments.
“I photographed what I wanted when I wanted,” Graves says. “I think I had a few conversations [in which I was asked] why I don't photograph more at dusk or dawn, or go when it's beautiful outside. And I was like, ‘If I'm photographing Confederate monuments, I don't see any reason to try to make these things look good. It's not about them looking good, it's about archiving these things so that there is an archive of it.’”
In January 2021, one of Graves’ photos for the outlet—showing a graffitied, 61-foot statue of Robert E. Lee illuminated by an image of George Floyd on the base and BLM on Lee’s horse—graced the cover of the annual “Year In Pictures” issue. The image itself has become emblematic of the Black Lives Matter movement and the tumultuous summer of 2020.
#ProofofPurchase
Just as Graves has not forgotten fellow Purchase alumni, neither have they forgotten him. Earlier this year, he was honored with the #ProofofPurchase Alumni Achievement Award for his embodiment of the values of the College.
“In addition to working on important social issues—and doing it really well,” notes nominating alumnus Stephen Sage ’04, Economics, “he also works relentlessly to use his success to help other artists get published.”
And, needless to say, when you’re committed to creating art and uplifting fellow artists, there’s no rest for the weary. Next on Graves’ agenda: selling 12 recently published books, collaborating on another with National Geographic highlighting Black stories in America’s national parks, a fellowship (“I need to figure out how to photograph stories of misinformation, which is not as easy as it sounds—or it may not even sound easy”), and ongoing work exploring southern landscapes that highlight “American Problems.”
“And besides all that,” he says, “keep day jobs.”
Well, if that’s all…
(Header Image: George Floyd Projection, Richmond, Virginia, 2020)
