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Through Crewdson’s Eyes

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By Geo Ong

Gregory Crewdson spends a lot of time in his car, driving slowly down the same streets in small Massachusetts towns, much like Edward Hopper had been known to take long trips by himself across the country. Crewdson is location scouting. Oftentimes he’ll park his car and walk down an alley, or through an empty car park and behind its stores, where perhaps there would be an abandoned set of railroad tracks, or an overgrowth of unkempt shrubbery. He doesn’t take pictures during these scouting sessions. Instead he breathes in its air and gathers the feeling of the space. And if he decides to come back, he comes back with a story to place within it.

Ben Shapiro’s documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters just opened in New York City last October. The film follows Crewdson through the six-year effort of making and taking the pictures that would comprise a body of work called Beneath the Roses. Much of Crewdson’s creative process echoes that of a filmmaker. In addition to location scouting, there are preliminary sketches that echo film storyboarding. There is a massive crew on hand and on call to move this here and take that there. There are giant lighting structures. There are permits, closed-off roads, props, and actors. There is, above all, the audacious element of faking reality.

The difference, of course, is instead of creating a film of however length, every effort of this process is to create one single moment: a still image. Crewdson’s work has always blended the visual components of photography and film. Crewdson isn’t a filmmaker, but he is able take certain filmmaking components, as well as the things he is drawn to in films, and translate them into still photography. Beneath the Roses looks as though David Lynch snuck into and contaminated the world of Edward Hopper, a world already fragile and on the quiet edge of desperation, where it need only a nudge, a simple temptation, to lure it toward further darkness.

‘Morning Sun’ (1952) by Edward Hopper

A still from ‘Inland Empire’ (2006) by David Lynch

From ‘Beneath the Roses’ (2008) by Gregory Crewdson

Imagine seeing the world through Crewdson’s eyes. Or just pretend you’re accompanying him while he scouts out locations. Dilapidated buildings, decrepit old model vehicles, saggy and stretched old clothing on people with dark bags under their eyes. Crewdson won’t deny that these images are sad. But Crewdson’s work comes from a curiosity in blending things that either don’t go together or could go together well but don’t usually get the chance. Photography and film is the primary example, but they aren’t the only things undergoing a torrid affair in Crewdson’s pictures. His photographs depict a world of dark secrets, embedded in solitude and abject sadness, yet these are the worlds Crewdson imagines, the worlds to which he is drawn. These are the worlds he attempts, painstakingly and meticulously, to bring to life, because these are in essence the worlds he finds beautiful.

If you are indeed seeing the world through Gregory Crewdson’s eyes, you are looking, searching, creating, and recreating that perfect, beautiful moment. That kind of pressure usually spells doom for most artists, but it is what fuels Crewdson and his pictures. The two words that he seemed to have said the most in this documentary are ‘beautiful’ and ‘perfect’. He never uses them to describe the finished products of his work; rather, ‘beautiful’ is what he starts off with, and ‘perfect’ is what he strives for.



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