Gregory Crewdson
Photographer Gregory Crewdson has seldom been considered traditional, but a new exhibit shows he has something in common with the past as he moves his art forward.
Crewdson is showing some of his work at the Williams College Museum of Art, alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper. One image in particular bears an uncanny resemblance to one of Hopper's and features a woman staring out of a bedroom window, filled with lament. The major difference between the two works is that Crewdson's woman is in underwear and the full spectacle of the room is explored, while Hopper's woman is nude and its perspective more intimate.
Crewdson was as shocked as anyone when the similarity was pointed out to him. Although a huge fan of Hopper's work, he had not set out to do any sort of homage or pastiche, he was just focused on making the best image he could.
"Artists always have a relationship to the tradition in which they work," said Crewdson, "so I think that maybe on an unconscious level, previous images saturate you in some way or another."
While the photos do share similarities in subject matter and mood, Crewdson's work is filled with similar imagery — it's just not that hard to find a half-naked woman with a haunted visage inhabiting some ghostly moment in the twilight of consciousness. Crewdson acknowledges as much, but tends to not analyze too closely.
"I know I'm interested in a particular type, a certain kind of hauntedness or loneliness, a beauty and a certain kind of nakedness," he said. "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."
Some of Crewdson's most major influences are filmmakers, and a couple of them, most notably Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, have similarly well-documented preoccupations with the use of women in psychological imagery.
Lynch tells a story from his childhood that involves a female neighbor walking down the neighborhood street as children looked on, an incident that inspired an infamous nude scene with Isabella Rossellini in "Blue Velvet." Crewdson is also able to point to a similar smoking gun — he thinks.
"I think we were all at the next-door neighbor's Christmas party," he said, "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."
Crewdson's confusion over the validity of the memory is the epitome of his work. It is not so much important that the incident happened as he remembers it; it is more important as something that exists as a vivid perception in his mind — one that informs he work constantly. Similarly, his photographs can either function as documents of actual events in the lives of his subjects or more inward events in their mind's eye. In this way, nakedness — both the state and the word — are of total importance to the images.
"I guess you could make a distinction between naked and the nude," Crewdson said. "Naked just feels more psychological."
It seems appropriate that Crewdson comes up with a lot of his ideas while swimming, when his body is floating and separated from the gravity that binds us to our world, afloat in his own — much like the people he portrays. In a practical way, swimming provides Crewdson with a total sensory immersion into himself, removing him from the busy work of daily life in order to let his mind wander.
"As I'm swimming, I'm counting the laps, and at some point, images do emerge," he said. "I start to think about that and then I let it sit. If it stays up there, I try to make a picture of it."
Crewdson has two distinct ways of taking a photo, either on a sound stage or on location. The Berkshires have been host to a number of his location shots, as well as some studio work at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The locations he chooses might be considered boring by some people, as they often involve newer, more suburban housing, a lot of ranch style abodes, sometimes new neighborhood developments. On occasion, he will venture into what could be construed as the wrong side of town.
"What I'm most interested in now is a kind of nondescript, desolate town where everything feels like it's from another period, but you can't quite put your finger on it," Crewdson said.
Although he was born and raised in Park Slope, a section of Brooklyn, Crewdson's family owns a cabin in Becket, and the time spent there through his life has fired his focus on the Berkshires in his photography. He admits his life in the city may well have created a general perception of small towns as exotic — fueled by specific experience in 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," he said. "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."
A final photograph by Crewdson is the result of a number of influences and obsessions and experiences coming together to tell a story — and he does consider himself very much a storyteller. Despite this, he says he has absolutely no interest in filmmaking whatsoever, preferring to give his attention to the single image and nothing on either side of it. The story is implied — beyond that is a result of the dance between Crewdson and the viewers — what he brings and they bring.
"I really don't have any interest in the before or after," he said. "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."
