American photographer: Gregory Crewdson Crewdson is best known for carefully staged photos of American homes and neighborhoods, typically set in small-town America, featuring disturbing, surreal events. 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—and, more importantly, the frame is de-contextualized: 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 (written by Alma Vescovi and Alyssa Loh) Gregory Crewdson on his art “Since a photograph is frozen and mute, since there is no before and after, I don’t want there to be a conscious awareness of any kind of literal narrative. And that’s why I really try not to pump up motivation or plot or anything like that. I want to privilege the moment. That way, the viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture.” “Well, if my pictures are about anything at all, I think it’s about trying to make a connection in the world. I see them as more optimistic in a certain way. Even though it’s very clear there’s a level of sadness and disconnection, I think that they’re really about trying to make a connection and almost the impossibility of doing so. And I think maybe the figures—that’s a good word—the figures in my pictures are stand-ins for my own need to make a connection.” “The whole reason I make these pictures is for those moments of clarity. For that single moment, everything seems to make sense in my world. And I think we all look for that in our lives, because our lives are generally filled with chaos and confusion and disorder and complication. And we all strive to find moments of clarity, of order.”
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 18:51:53 +0000
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