Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (born September 26, 1962) is an American photographer best known for elaborately staged, dramatic cinematic style scenes of middle American homes and neighborhoods. They feature what is often described as disturbing and surreal moments in time, though Crewdson himself sees them as optimistic.

"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 in my pictures are stand-ins for my own need to make a connection."

Gregory Crewdson

To take one photograph he employs large crews of people who are experienced with motion picture production, but the subjects in his scenes often have no experience in modelling or acting at all. Whether he builds the entire set (as with the image above) or shuts down an entire street, he pays particular attention to even the tiniest details in his shots that most other people wouldn't see. (Note in the image above the stains on the walls and that one of the lights in the ceiling is missing its fixture. The lighting has also been done in a very particular way that indicates a car has just driven past and its headlights are briefly shining in through the windows.)

Much like my previous post here, it is this meticulous attention to detail in order to tell a story that really catches my attention. The more you look the more you see, and the more you're drawn into the image and the story that's being told.

At first glance, your eye is drawn immediately to the relatively well-lit girl on the bed. In stark contrast to everything else in the scene - and particularly the woman on the other bed - the girl has an eerie beauty about her with her smooth skin, her pristine white nightgown, and her straight hair sitting neatly behind her shoulders. Even her bed looks relatively neat and tidy - as if she hasn't yet lain in it - compared to the other, whose messy sheets indicate its occupant was highly restless and disturbed at some point prior to the photo.

My first thought was that maybe something happened to the husband/father of the family, but the fact that there are two single beds in the room contradicts this. The two have clearly been living alone in that old house for quite some time, so it could just be general misfortune - a lost job, a poor life, wondering how they're going to manage or survive, how the woman can provide for the girl's future - that has gotten the woman seeming so hopeless and depressed.

Whatever ill has befallen these two - or most likely just the woman - the expression on the girl's face as well as her position on the bed (not sleeping) shows she is not ignorant of what's going on, but is entirely helpless to do anything about it or for the woman who has clearly been hit by it very hard. In fact, given that the woman is turned away from the girl, it seems that the woman herself is refusing to allow the girl to help and doesn't want to open up and share her burdens.

As such, this image really does reflect what Crewdson said in the quote above about trying to connect and yet it being impossible to do so. These two figures are clearly connected - perhaps as mother and daughter, which one usually expects to be a fairly close bond - and yet in this moment they are certainly not connecting (it may even be almost impossible for them to do so) even though both might perhaps deeply want to.