Cris Pulos . An abrupt goodbye

The real Cris Pulos

Cris Pulos was my friend for 15 years. He was one of four long time photographers who met every couple of months to share their latest efforts and to opine on the state of our art. Cris had been a photographer since he studied at the New England School of Photography in 1969, and probably much earlier. He studied Photography and Printmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from1969 to 1971. And he studied Creative Photography with Minor White at MIT in 1971. And in 1975 he took Master Classes in Printmaking at Colorado State University. In short Cris was a serious photographer and a student of the craft for more than 50 years. He was also a renowned photogravure practitioner whose work is shown at Wilder Nightingale Fine Art in Taos and the Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe.  

His work has been shown in dozens of exhibitions across the United States. One was a four man show called Four Guys Two Galleries in 2016. The four guys were Cris, Terry Thompson, Bill Davis, and yours truly. The galleries were Wilder Nightingale Fine Art and David Anthony Fine Art both in Taos. I'm glad we mounted a show together.

He paid the bills as a chef from 1975 through 2003. He was the chef-owner of the Chartwood Inn in Manitou Springs, Colorado from 1988 until he and his wife Jean moved to Taos nearly 20 years ago.

When Terry Thompson called Tuesday to tell me Cris had passed away at 77, I was stunned. He was the youngster of our foursome. We knew Cris had been struggling since the first of the year but had no idea how serious it was. He had jumped off a truck onto a rock and ruptured his spleen. We got occasional updates on his spleen but nothing more.

Terry learned on Tuesday that Cris also had cancer. Then he contracted Covid, and our understanding is that he died of pneumonia. Tyler Hannigan, a neighbor of Cris’s, gave the bad news to Terry who in turn passed it on to me and the fourth member of our group, Bill Davis. I must underscore that the details of Cris’s passing are third hand and subject to errors of fact.

Cris Pulos was a gregarious guy and a supporter and friend to, well, everybody. He was also a guileless soul. There was no pretense in the man. He was a great storyteller who was given to repeating the best ones. It was oddly endearing. He was a connoisseur of food, wine and well realized photographs. He will be missed.

We didn’t know about the cancer, the Covid and the pneumonia till he’d departed this earth and it was too late to offer our love and support. All we knew was that his spleen was not healing and that he was housebound. Shouldn't  that have prompted a little more attention? Yes, it should have. It's a lesson I hope I've learned.

Cris Pulos was unabashedly Greek. His face was a map of the Greek Islands. His moustache, Greek fisherman’s hat and smile are the image I’ll always carry of a truly good man. Some years back he and I traded portrait sessions. The fruit of that effort is up top. He thought he looked old. I thought he was ruggedly handsome. He looked just like Cris Pulos.