Les Klug

Les Klug attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he majored in chemical engineering, before putting his studies on hold during a tour in the army. After returning to Madison he began a job managing the darkroom at the University of Wisconsin Union and eventually dropped out of school. He was also hired by the university's Department of Education to construct a slide library, and during this period he began to use the darkroom facilities regularly and to spend time around the students and faculty of the Department of Art. In the early 1970s he moved to Chicago, where he devoted himself fully to photography and began teaching at Northeastern Illinois University.

From early on, Klug was interested in using photography in unconventional ways to shape new views of reality or to explore conceptual problems. In 1972 he stated, "I realized I wanted to carry something to photography, to make photographs, not simply take them." Initially he used analog processes such as solarization and double exposures to manipulate the visual content in his black and white photographs. Through these techniques he created imaginative compositions, often combining multiple images that play with one's sense of reality and create various visual illusions. In the mid-1980s, prior to his death in 1988, Les Klug was among the early artists to experiment with digital technology as a way to shape photographic imagery. A substantial body of Klug's work is held in the Wisconsin Artists Collection at Carroll University.

Text © Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018