The Incredible Case of the Stack o' Wheats Murders, made by Les Krims in 1969-71, stages apparent murders of nude women in domestic settings with pancakes and syrup.
Prompted by forensic photographs in a coroner's textbook, the project examines how photography constructs rather than simply records reality. Krims described it as a fabricated conceptual fiction intended to question the photograph's status as evidence and to criticize conventions of socially concerned and street photography. He also characterized the work as an expression of revulsion toward violent crime. Feminist critics and later scholars have challenged that position, arguing that its eroticized staging turns violence against women into a visual and conceptual device. The tension between these readings remains central to the project's history.
Across ten images, female bodies are carefully arranged as apparent corpses, often with obscured faces, simulated wounds, torn clothing, and bloodlike chocolate syrup. Stacks of pancakes recur as markers of the supposed killer's victim count, while bananas, Coca-Cola bottles, and domestic objects introduce the visual language of advertising and consumption. The monochrome images combine the conventions of crime-scene evidence with posed sensuality and absurdist detail. Their mood shifts between clinical detachment, black humor, and unease.
The photographs were made in 35mm and were subsequently developed into several forms of presentation. Most significant was the 1972 boxed folio, which gathered ten small sepia-toned photomechanical prints in a deliberately inexpensive, reproducible format rather than presenting the series only as conventional exhibition photographs. An original print version extended the fiction beyond the images themselves by including sealed packets of pancake mix and chocolate syrup, together with instructions for constructing a "stack" like those appearing in the photographs. The project thus moved from staged scenes to a staged object: the portfolio transformed the recurring props of the photographs into physical materials that entered the collector’s own space.
Krims first presented the project at New York's Witkin Gallery in 1972 as framed press sheets, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the limited-edition folio that year. Its reception became inseparable from controversy in 1980, when a copy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was torn apart and covered with chocolate syrup in a feminist anti-rape intervention. Later institutional presentations have foregrounded these ethical questions, including the Spencer Museum of Art's 2009 exhibition Ethics of Publishing Disturbing Images and Shadai Gallery's 2015 display of four series prints.
