In Crewdson’s photographs a collision between the normal and the paranormal exists which serves to transform the familiar suburban landscape into a place of wonder and anxiety (Cube, 2017)
Gregory Crewdson was and continues to be one of the most major inspirations to my work. Having been exposed to his work during my Btec photography course I immediately fell in love with each single and independent enigmatic moment he created. His cinematic use of colour and lighting immediately influenced my own work, dictating that I would begin to shoot almost entirely at night rather than during the day, using long shutter speeds and high apertures to capture urban landscapes flooded with contrasting tungsten and LED streetlamps, creating bold colour casts across my photos. For example, the image below taken recently shows a clear resemblance to Crewdsons image above in location, framing and colour. I can also see now however that my image appears more saturated that Crewdsons, and I feel that my framing is not as clear as Crewdson. In his image, there is a clear frame around the centre subject, with a change in colour separating the border of trees, the blue fog of the background, and the young boy, helping to guide the viewers eye through the image. The strong green hue through my image never changes, and each section of the frame bleeds into the next. Crewdons subjects stands plain to see, despite taking only a small portion of the frame, whilst mine disappears partly into the darkness. If I return to this location, its clear I will need to consider framing and subject positioning carefully if I aim to create imagery as strong as Crewdson.
In addition to simple his style and aesthetic, Crewdson's own inspirations lead me to consider the uncanny in my work. The forward to Crewdsons Twilight (Crewdson and Moody 2002) mentions his interest in psychology due to his fathers work, and in particular the work of Sigmund Freud, referencing the famous essay "The Interpretations of Dreams" (witch was an inspiration of the Surrealist Movement), however also noting that a more important essay to Crewdson would have been Freuds "The Uncanny". The tableuxs Crewdons orchestrates for his work fall quite comfortably into Freuds reconciling of the word "Uncanny" as something familiar yet strange (Heavily paraphrased here, I have discussed this in other blog posts). These moments that Crewdson present to us are unexplained, we are uninformed, but the locations and environments where they take place are within the vernacular for many of his audience, my self included, and so we relate heavily to much of the scene, but Ccrewdon interjects with clear signifiers or punctums, sometimes small sometimes large (a simple light shining from above or interior covered entirely in garden plants), that cause us to reanalyze something that we may see everyday, to cause tension and enigma in a familiar setting. In other words, Crewdsons work is a comprehensive visual exercise in the uncanny, and I would like my work to be the same.
Crewdson, G. & Moody, R. 2002, Twilight, Harry N. Abrams, New York ; London.
Cube, W. (2017). Gregory Crewdson: Twilight | White Cube. [online] Whitecube.com. Available at: http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/gregory_crewdson_twilight_hoxton_square_2002/[Accessed 10 March 2019].
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