Gregory Crewdson

Presented in class by Elena Davis

• Staged scenes in America
• Teacher + photographer
• Edward Hopper, Nighthawks is an inspiration
• Rain making machines, fire, fog machines + lights
• Hollywood scale production techniques
• Very famous, some prints go for $150,000
• Dark areas + shadows
• Close encounter series: ie. House full of flowers, lady sitting amongst
• Intriguing
• Bold colours
• Looks like a movie scene/shoot but it’s for a photo
• Set design, lighting etc.
• Location scouting or sound stage design (makes it himself) (2 key aspects)
• Finding meaning through like
• Tensions … between strange and normal
• Father was a psychoanalyst
• Technique: Bracketing - 3 or more images combined
• His pictures are distinct, from a particular world
• Handballs all the work to his production manager
• He’s still designing it, his vision but he just has a production team
• Takes aspects of his work as inspiration ie. light
• His use of…. Shards of light + shadows, which create extra details
• Reference to a movie + aliens “close encounters”
• Beneath the roses
• Tension: why is she standing in the middle of the road?
• No protagonist or object/subject is missing
• Left with possibilities
• “Inverted narrative”
• He gives you details, but you make the story yourself
• Interested in the human condition not the photograph itself

Website: http://www.aperture.org/crewdson/


This image is so quirky and controversial, I love how the subject is just sitting there in a bed of flowers, in the middle of a kitchen/home/interior! She looks rundown and tired, or disappointed. The light coming in from the window creates strong highlights and shadows in this image.




I find this image really intriguing. Why is she standing there, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night. The car is suspicious and the street lit by moonlight or streetlight is dead quite as you would expect. The lack of the protagonist (what the woman is staring at or facing) is a strong aspect of this compostion. Like you only have half of the story.


Watching the video on the making of this photograph was really intersting because I got shown what was there before and the changes made on Photoshop. I also got to see how the artist works, he's a director and set designer but he doesn't physically take the photograph himself.


This was one of the images which Elena mentioned she really liked. I also like this image. I think the vines frame the image. The quality of the image is so rich it appears like it is graphic and photoshopped but it is real. The light is a key aspect and works well to highlight the sparse nature of the abondoned, and rundown rail line.