January 25th, 2008 John
Photographer Gregory Crewdson is known for his meticulous, cinematic work, where mysterious circumstances are depicted as nuggets in a larger story. His photo shoots work like movie sets — indoor sets are crafted with the same detail and intensity, while his on location work can often resemble a movie crew at work, and can cause as much disruption and awe.
Crewdson’s images are often captured at night and mostly depict people in some moment of their own personal twilight — his book of the same name is a collection of surreal moments captured, slices of time laid down on the page for the audience to decipher. His subjects might be staring off, lost in something the camera can’t capture — women are often in their underwear and look surprised to be in feminine bodies. Men are obsessive, attending to mounds of dirt and piles of junk that they have amassed in their living space. There is often the slight suggestion of another presence — unseen but felt, lurking and watching from off the frame. Perhaps it is the viewer, perhaps a god, perhaps a UFO. Crewdson keeps it to himself.
His upcoming book, “Beneath the Roses,” is a collaboration with author Russell Banks. Crewdson lives in New York City and teaches at Yale.
JM: Some people have noticed a similarity between you and Edward Hopper — particularly between your untitled photo from winter of 2004 and his painting “Morning in a City.”
GC: Believe it or not, I didn’t have it in mind at all. I guess that’s how art operates. Obviously I’m a big fan of Hopper and know his work really well, but I wasn’t in any way attempting to do an homage or pastiche of his work, I was just entirely focused on making the best picture I could.
Artists always have a relationship to the tradition in which they work, so I think that maybe on an unconscious level previous images saturate you in some way or another.
JM: Your photos are filled with women in the same mood as the Hopper woman— various states of undress, disarray. Where does the interest lie?
GC: That’s not something I’m very conscious of. I know I’m interested in a particular type, a certain kind of hauntedness or loneliness, and beauty, and a certain kind of nakedness. Anything more than that I’d be hesitant to try and articulate, I like to keep it a mystery in a certain sense. To myself, I mean.
JM: No pivotal moment in your life to explain the preoccupation — like that story David Lynch has about the naked woman walking down the street when he was a kid?
JM: It might be a similar kind of thing, and now I’m not even quite sure if I was there or if I just heard my parents talk about it, but I think we were all at the next door neighbor’s in Brooklyn Christmas party and it was all very proper and everything, and the mother walked down the stairs of her house completely naked. I don’t even know if I was there, but I’ve always had that in my mind. I love that notion. I guess you could make a distinction between naked and the nude. Naked just feels more psychological.
It was just when we were talking right now, I was reminded of that story, and that’s why I’m unclear as to whether I was there or not, but I can follow that up, I’ll ask my mother about it. Or I just completely made it up, I’m not quite sure. I don’t think so. I draw from certain images in my mind and something stays up there or not. If it stays up there, I try to make a picture of it.
JM: I’ve heard you come up with your ideas while swimming.
GC: During the day, there are always distractions, things happening, even in my studio there’s very little time for allowing your imagination just to open up, so when I swim, I just very consciously allow my imagination to wander. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. As I’m swimming, I’m counting the laps and, at some point, images do emerge. I start to think about that and, then, I let it sit and if it stays, I start to think about, well, what kind of room would that be in or what would the space look like, all that.
I have two distinct ways of working — on location, which is more location-driven, where I look around over and over again for a location that might work for one of my pictures, but if I’m working on a sound stage, I start with an empty space and I have to build everything up. So if the image stays with me, I work with the art director and start working on all the fiscal aspects of creating it.
JM: There are stories implied in your images. Does a story come to your mind at some point along with the image?
GC: In terms of what it actually means? No. I really don’t have any interest in the before or after. I am just completely invested in the single moment. I can have some ideas, but I much prefer to keep that a mystery and just make sure that I render that single moment as perfectly as I can.
JM: Are you a movie fan?
GC: I love films in general, I love light on the screen. My favorite filmmakers— David Lynch, Cronenberg, Hitchcock, Orson Welles — in all these filmmakers, there are levels of meaning where nothing is as it appears to be. In terms of influence, I could be looking at any movie and there could be a scene in the movie that strikes me as beautiful that I could just file away.
JM: Your photographs could be mistaken for stills from a film.
GC: Ultimately, there’s a big difference from a movie in that there’s a certain kind of investment to a single image that no movie could sustain. That’s one of the reasons I don’t make movies, because I love the notion of putting everything into a single picture.
JM: Do you think of yourself as a storyteller?
GC: Yes, I do, a storyteller in a very particular way. I don’t want my pictures to be hermetic or inaccessible. I want the pictures to tell a story of some sort and engage the viewer. Photography has a very limited capacity to tell a story, so it’s a very different kind of story than film or literature.
JM: It’s an implied story.
GC: Of course, like all photographs are.
JM: Do you think of yourself as a New England photographer?
GC: That’s an awful interesting thing. At this point, I feel like it’s very clear that a setting is so important to my pictures and I’ve made all my pictures in and around the Berkshires. The way I see it is that the setting is a stage for my picture-making activities and it’s an important one, but I also want the picture to feel like it could be anywhere.
It’s the place, it’s my connection with the place and it’s my imagined sense of the place all coming together. My family has a cabin in Becket and that’s the starting point of why I make pictures there. And we still have that cabin.
JM: What’s your trajectory in photography been?
GC: I started photography late in life. I really didn’t start until I was an undergraduate at SUNY Purchase, that’s really when I took my first photography class and, from that moment, it was very obvious what I wanted to do.
The first art photograph that really had a profound effect on me was the Diane Arbus retrospective that my father took me to when I was 10-years-old. It wasn’t until later I realized that I had that connection. It’s a long list of people who have influenced me, from Cindy Sherman to William Eggleston.
JM: What sort of photos did you take when you first started?
GC: I’ve always, over and over again, been drawn to the same subject matter, suburban landscapes, small towns, always.
JM: Is it a case of a city kid finding a rural area exotic?
GC: I feel the reason I’m drawn to that kind of imaginative place is that I look at it with a sense of wonder and awe, but I also feel like I have a double life. I have my life in New York with my family, and then I have my more imaginative life when I’m in Massachusetts and I make my pictures.
What I’m most interested in now is a kind of non-descript, desolate town where everything feels like its from another period, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.
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