Gregory Crewdson

Research Strategy...

Vertical thinking is a type of approach to problems that usually involves one being selective , analytical and sequential.

Lateral thinking is a term coined by Edward de Bono, a psycholigist and writer. He defines lateral thinking as methods of thinking concerned with changing concepts and perception. Lateral thinking is about ideas.

I am studying the work of Gregory Crewdson as I find it visually incredible through the technique of staging a scene in an illustrative way and capturing mysterious scenes in his photographs. I am going to look further into his work in two ways, by identifying veritcal and lateral reference points.

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer born Sept 1962 and is best known for elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighbourhoods. He lives and works in New York.

The Natural Wonder collection (1992 - 1997)

Vertical

Early photography are reminiscent of the many hours spent playing in a 'shabby acre of woods' between his fathers church and a row of subdivision split levels.

As an adolescent, Crewdson lived with his family in Virginia. Troubled by the tensions between his parents, this seemed to have an effect and project dark emotions onto nature in his work.

White Flight and Economic Depression

Beginning in the mid 1950's and particularly in the 1960's, poor working class African American's and Puerto Rican migrants began to move into Brooklyn. The change in demographics coincided with the changes in the local economy. At the same time, locally rising energy costs, advances in transportation, and the invention of steel, encouraged beer companies to move out of New York city. As the breweries closed , the neighbourhood deteriorated along with much of Brooklyn and New York City. In a five year period the hometown of Crewdson was transformed from a neatly maintained community of wood houses into a place of abandoned buildings, empty lots, drugs and arson. Crewdson briefly mentions elements of his childhood like this and how it has affected his future work.

There is a particular image of a transformed leg in which it becomes the part of the body incorpoarting itself and becoming one with the landscape. 'Theres a confusion and collapsing of the bounderies that hold the body apart from its surroundings.' The vines are growing into the leg and sprouting thorns and this photograph carries narrative and fairytale qualites. Crewdson states that in these series of 'body part' photographs it was heavily affected by the break up of his marriage.

He intentionally grounds mysterious or unknowable events within recognisable and iconic situations, which is the domestic American landscape.

He describes himself as an 'American realist landscape photographer.'

Lateral

Creative influences in Crewdson's work are most obviously surrealism, nature and mankind.

'Crewdson's imagery points to the existence of a raw and undomesticated God'

As mentioned previously, the photograph where a foot is embedded with thorn vines has many suggestions to influences, such as faitytales and fables. The thorns moving through the flesh of a charred leg resemble the briars encasing sleeping beauty's slumbering castle, and the fleshy vines that surround a rotting hand in another photograph look like the leafy beanstalk jack scaled to confront his giant.

In his early work he is hugely influened by the work of artist Marchel Dumchamp, in particularly the piece ' Etant Donnes', in which the influence of the body and the 'peephole' technique are highly recognisable. The main relationship between Crewdson and Dumchamp's work is that they are both only interested finally in the image and not the installation.

This fantasy approach clearly highlights the mood in his work.

He states ' I am interested in creating tension between domesticity and nature, the normal and paranormal or the artifice and reality all creating a mysterious illusion.'

He also uses icongraphs of nature and the American landscape as methaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire.

Overall, I think his work is determined by is own strong style and working method and the influences discussed, surrounding the combination between fantasy and reality.