Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson

WHO?

• Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighborhoods.

• Crewdson was born in Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn.

HOW?

• Since he shoots with a Hasselblad Sinar 8x10 camera, his field of composition includes people, sky, cars, streets and buildings. In essence, the scale of his compositions matches the possibilities inherent in the 8x10 camera format.

• With production teams and set budgets that rival those of entire films, Crewdson chronicles moments of disconnect—downcast eyes, faces turned away—in expansive portraits of people lost in thought, isolated and inaccessible, both to each other and to the viewer.

Process…

• A shoot from beginning to end (6 p.m. to 9:15 p.m.) can be up to three hours.

• The images produced will end up selling for $80,000 to $100,000 per print, in editions of 10, so essentially it's a million dollar shoot every time Crewdson decides to compose an image.

What?

• His images are rich in detail, and there is not a thing in the frame—not a stain, not a lampshade—that he does not carefully select. And yet, this abundance of detail is balanced with a striking lack of information—the settings are ordinary (a suburban kitchen, a living room, a dark street corner)—and, more importantly, the frame is de-contextualised: we don’t know what happens before or after, or who these people even are

• The effect of this combination of visual detail and narrative restraint is that there are as many narratives possible for each of his images as there are viewers of it: each person comes to the image with their own anxieties and desires, which they project onto the scene.

WHY?

• Gregory wrote in an article entitled "Aesthetics of Alienation" for the Tate Modern Museum that "There are these very ordinary situations, and the light is being used as a narrative code to reveal the story. It also provides some possibility of transformation of the ordinary, which gives the images a certain theatricality." This is the key insight to understand how Gregory creates images that resonate beyond the mere representation.

Video

Write down on your SHEET answers to the questions, whilst the movie is playing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtyUkGSS14