Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who is best known for his elaborate staging of scenes of the everyday American homes and neighborhoods. His photographs normally take place in small town America but his elaborate staging makes the images dramatic and have a cinematic quality to them. His images are often disturbing and surreal almost mythical and magical in it’s underlying message. His images have a science fiction quality to them and you can almost find yourself waiting to see aliens that have inhabited the characters in each image, and some images have this beam of light coming from the sky reiterating that sci-fi quality. Other images have a raw and sexual quality as well. He normally has a large crew helping him to create these scenes. He has two distinct ways of working in terms of creating images, one is on location and the other is on a soundstage. Most of his images are taken in Massachusetts in a seriously small town of North Adams. The models that he uses in his images are usually the locals from the town where he is taking the picture. The images above show a range of the work he creates. I really appreciate the creativity that goes into each shot, telling a story of the everyday mundane in a dramatic way that transcends the image into a mythical or whimsical place that may or may not exist in reality. My favorite image and the first image I ever saw of his work is the woman who is lying in a flooded living room ghost pale as if she is dead. The cinematic quality of this image is quite amazing and once you begin to dissect how this effect was achieved it’s even more unbelievable, just the time and money that goes into one image is crazy. Not a lot of photographers’ stage like he does but his end results are quite beautiful and disturbing, making these everyday neighborhoods and people into deserted zombies. The solitary figure in a room alone with or without a beam of light helps the viewer to think of that sci-fi influence like the character has been abducted and they’re in a trance back home. Other images show this same feeling of aloneness and drama but outside in nature or in the streets of these neighborhoods. I really do enjoy these images and the solitude that each one exudes and the mysterious qualities each of them have. His influences are photographer Diane Arbus who is one of my favorites as well and her work is dark and often showed the hidden side of society that most people didn’t want to see, and also painter Edward Hopper. Crewdson has exhibited all over the world and continues to create work. He told pbs.org in an interview, “I think I always have been drawn to photography because I want to construct a perfect world…. And in all my pictures what I am ultimately interested in is that moment of transcendence or transportation, where one is transported into a place, into a perfect, still world.”