Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (born September 26, 1962) is an American photographer. He photographs tableaux of American homes and neighborhoods. Crewdson’s photographs usually take place in small-town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. His photographs are elaborately staged and lit using crews familiar with motion picture production and lighting large scenes using motion picture film equipment and techniques. He has cited the films Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe as having influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus.

Crewdson’s photography became a convoluted mix between his formal photography education and his experimentation with the ethereal perspective of life and death, a transcending mix of lively pigmentation and morbid details within a traditional suburbia setting. Crewdson was unknowingly in the making of the Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, earning him a following both from his previous educators and what would become his future agents and promoters of his work. The grotesque yet beautifully created scenes were just the beginning of Crewdson’s work, all affected with the same narrative mystery he was so inspired by in his childhood and keen eye for the surreal within the regular. Fireflies, has become a standout amongst his collections known for their heightened emotion and drama compared to its simplicity of color and spontaneity. the exploration of form within his own work was evident within his transformation of how the photo was taken rather than just focusing on the subject.

The creation of the self defined American realist landscape photographer and his peculiar style originates from Crewdson’s long appreciation for 20th century melodramas and literature, specifically Hitchcock and Ralph Waldo Emerson. These films drove Crewdson to challenge the essence of light and force it in a new direction in Twilight, a dramatic, highly pigmented collection of images that channel dusk to the subject of the photograph. Crewdson wanted to focus even more heavily on the suburban lifestyle that is the focus of his main movie inspirations. Known for their methodical yet rhythmic use of language, Hitchcock and Emerson developed a new challenge for Crewdson by changing language to visuals in the most effective way. The look of sadness and contemplation on the subjects faces was something most major galleries had never seen, intentional sadness yet in such a bland and unexpected way. Similarly, Dream House captures the same “moment between moment” of thought from the subject from creative angles and cryptic perspectives.

Gregory Crewdson’s most recognized and iconic collection is Beneath the Roses, similar to his previous projects, its haunted urgency and profound dislocation from the audience is uncomfortable yet familiar. Branching off of his previous collections, Beneath the Roses was aimed to capture cinematic production in the stillness of one picture. With a budget similar to that of a small movie production, each image involved hundreds of people and weeks to months of planning. Crewdson’s interventions into the streets of typical American suburbia became a nuance interpretation of reality of lifestyle focusing on the most dramatic emotions and complex moments of silence and thought for the subject.

Crewdson explored the idea of challenging tradition with experimentation of his title outside of the U.S. at the abandoned Cinecittá studios outside of Rome. Known for its mysterious stillness and emptied character, the set was new to Crewdson’s typical use of subject and storyline but reflected the same balance and organic nature of a created set turned into an art piece. The simplicity of Sanctuary’s development contrasts Gregory’s tendency for detail and specificity evoking a more compelling landscape that was already created for him and caught the attention of White Cube, Crewdson’s European agent in London. By converting these cinematic scenes into ordinary life, he explores a new and unfamiliar genre of his own focused on naturalizing a manmade scenario in a world already based on the artifice of American lifestyles.

After years of exploring the idea of cinematic photography, Sanctuary was Crewdson’s return to photography, his original hobby and technical training. Most recently, Crewdson has created Cathedral of the Pines, similar to Beneath the Roses and Twilight, a distanced interpretation of exaggerated drama by an intervention into natural in its most synergetic state. The collection was shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York City. The collection returns to his early photographic origins in Becket, Massachusetts set deep in the woods far from familiarity of subject and setting.

TABLEAU PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY

WHAT IS A TABLEAU VIVANT?

Tableau vivant is french for ‘living picture’, and is a static scene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, the setting may also be theatrically lit. It works to combine both theatre and the visual arts. A tableau photograph can be achieved through staged photography, where a scene is set up, with models, posed, artificially purposefully lit, propped, set designed by the person taking the photo.

EXAMPLES:

HISTORY OF TABLEAU PHOTOGRAPHY:

‘Tableau Vivant’ was first used in the eighteenth century by French philosopher Denis Diderot to describe paintings with a certain type of composition. Tableau paintings were natural and realistic, and had the effect of walling off the observer from the drama taking place.

In the 1860s, the concept of tableau reached a crisis with Édouard Manet, a French modernist painter, decisively rejected the idea of tableau as suggested by Diderot, in his desire to make paintings that were realistic rather than idealised. He painted his characters facing the viewer with a new vehemence that challenged the beholder. In the 1970s, a group of aspiring young artists such as Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky began to make large format photographs that resembled paintings, that were designed to hang on a wall. As a result these photographers were obliged to take on the very same issues revealing the continued importance of tableau in contemporary art.

TABLEAU VIVANT IN PAINTINGS:
TABLEAU VIVANT PHOTOS AND PAINTINGS ALSO SHOW VARIOUS ASPECTS OF SYMBOLISM AND ALLEGORY:

Allegory in art is when the subject of the artwork, or the various elements that create the composition, is used to symbolise a deeper moral or spiritual meaning such as life, death, love, virtue, justice etc. Allegory is clearly represented in the ‘Christ in the House of His Parents‘ by John Everett Millais.

This is Millais’s first important religious subject, showing a scene from the boyhood of Christ. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850, it was given no title, but accompanied by a biblical quotation: ‘And one shall say unto him, What are those wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’ (Zech. 13:6).

Christian symbolism is prominent in the painting:

  • The carpenter’s triangle on the wall above Christ’s head, symbolises the Holy Trinity.
  •  The wood and nails prefigure the crucifixion
  • The young St John is shown fetching a bowl of water with which to bathe the wound. This clearly identifies him as the Baptist