Gregory Crewdson - "The praise of artifice
Sitting in his chair, slightly bent and arms between the legs, a middle-aged man scans the room-to-be made in ruins. Look alienated, sad and helpless, consistent with the scene around him: a big hole in the ground, pipes on display, excavating the walls, tables, games, lamps overturned. Beside him, a support table with food scraps, empty a bottle of whiskey, an ashtray full of butts crammed and a pot of coffee several days, will reveal a in front of the TV, plugged into any channel. The supernatural light that breaks through the ceiling indicates to us that something strange happened there, but the only witness to the incident refuses to talk. Is the American Dream shattered into shards. A fairy tale cursed, dissolved in that instant that reveals an uncomfortable and well known citizen of any ordinary American. The author of the picture, the American photographer Gregory Crewdson - one of the leading exponents of contemporary art photography - calls them "in between moments, moments that are somewhere between a past and a future that, in this case, assume a secondary role at all. Here only the present matters, does not dwell any memory or hope.
the past fifty years, photography has been losing its documentary nature to embrace a predominantly artistic side, assuming the role of storyteller. The "it was" evidenced by Roland Barthes in "Camera Lucida," or the "decisive moment" reinforced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, never ceased to be present. But the photograph turned out to gain some breathing room as an autonomous artistic medium settling primary objective of this art - to create fictional realities that are able to prompt a debate about the daily reality.
However, in this case, there is no story to tell, with its chapters and unsolved mysteries. There are, instead, a moment to contemplate, where the drama is the centerpiece. It is the potential for drama that grabs the viewer - an exercise in discovery and revelation which surrounds us in a kind of web of visual reasoning. Here, the images of Crewdson, the "fact" is constructed in the mind of the observer, through personal experience of each. The enjoyment is not merely a contemplative exercise and there is always the ambition to find out what is beyond the lens and the image fixed. This makes sense only through the participation of the observer - in line with what Marcel Duchamp advocated through the "ready-mades" in the early twentieth century.
Influenced by cultural imagery explored in some movies and American painting of the last century, Crewdson's work takes the form of a visual narrative in which the instantaneous fiction mingles with reality, revealing at the same time a great capacity for imagination Notice Boardis. There is thus a sort of "aura" benjamiana to bless this moment, enhanced by a "here" and a "now" suddenly stood before the destination.
Thus, by holding a portrait of the decaying working-class American suburbs, the photographer becomes an archaeologist of everyday life, where the scenarios studied rigorously, filled with tricks and theatricality (prominent in American visual culture), underpinning a new poetics in contemporary photography and assume a key role in understanding the space psychological images - an aesthetic experience that, at a time when Barack Obama takes the presidency of the United States of America and promises to renew the American Dream, POEA bare the weaknesses, fears and desires of a generation that nourishes the dream in front of the TV toward madness.
uncritical and anti-symbolic, unlike what happens in documentary photography, these visual narratives do not establish any hierarchy of values and all the details assume the same importance - an attitude certainly influenced by the activity of his father as a psychoanalyst, and also exploited by the Abstract Expressionists in the '50s and '60s, evident in works by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankethaler. Every detail is also calculated with an accuracy to the millimeter quasi-scientific and nothing seems to be random chance, which does not prevent Crewdson to adopt a detached stance and emotionally disconnected from their images.
With five sets of photographs taken in the last twenty years - "Natural Wonder" (1992-1997), "Hover" (1996-1997), "Twilight" (1998-2002) and "Beneath the Roses" (2003-2007 - Gregory Crewdson argues that there is a common denominator to all of them, giving the idea that we before a "work in progress." Each image is a total experience, unique, yet always inseparable from all the others. It is this "incompleteness" lies the beauty and mystery of his images.
Housed in a chain commonly known as "American vernacular," popularized by artists such as Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson's work (former guitarist of The Speedies, a British post-punk cult of the New York scene of the year 70, whose biggest hit is called, curiously, "Let Me Take Your Photo") is the photographic equivalent of the American evil, evidenced in the paintings of Eric Fischl and John Currin or the sculptures by Robert Gober. It is, however, that the painter Edward Hopper Crewdson is the creation of the microcosm of references highlighted in his work: the tone, light, air, uncomfortable silence, the psychological drama ; magician, composition, appearance, the union of two conflicting feelings in the same plane, céueo the hell, beauty, sadness, melancholy, alienaçãoeo desire - a set of tools that ultimately helps to create a dramatic sense and provide thickness to the scenes represented. About American painter, Gregory Crewdson even stated that "it is virtually impossible to 'read' visually America without reference to photography and film were influenced by his work."
With a strong connection to the movies, the aesthetic grandeur and complex compositions of his large-scale shows a method of working "Hollywood style" meticulous and perfectionist, involving the best efforts of a multidisciplinary team and extensive (more than forty people, between production assistants, development, extras, technicians, wardrobe, etc..) and several stages: pre-production (the birth of the idea), production will (realization of the idea in the field) and post-production (Digital image manipulation). These are days and months of hard work to work for the same purpose, condensed at the moment, which assumes a performative dimension total since the birth of the idea to its completion, from idea to record the processes of realizaçãoea own view. Gregory Crewdson not "take" pictures, he 'makes' photos. There is a certain "do" art and craft issue across areas - theater, cinema or painting - although supported in advanced technological means, which allows us to view his work as a visual opera.
However, despite the apparatus shown in the performance of each series, the imperative prevails in relation to photographic narrative codes cinema. The constant references to his work as an instant of a film are refuted by Crewdson himself when he argues that his images, unlike the movies, do not rely on a logical sequence and despise the moral commitments of the Seventh Art. Someone asked for a happy ending? There is where you will find, indeed.
gaze of the filmmaker emerges here, however, with pomp and circumstance. The references are obvious and recurring in the work of Crewdson: "Twilight" (1998-2002), where light appears as a code hopperiana narrative that gives the image such tatralidade and help decode the scene described the mixing of two opposing ideas as normal and the paranormal, the relationship between the interior and exterior, must refer to "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind" (1977). In the film directed by Steven Spielberg, the protagonist gradually moves away from the family and the local community, after witnessing a series of episodes aliens, experiencing the same alienation evident in the images of photographer , in "Blue Velvet" (1986), David Lynch, the use of saturated colors and transformed in darkness helped him set the tone of the story: in "Magnolia" (1999), director Paul Thomas Anderson focuses on the lives of a group of people who apparently do not have any connections with each other in a contemporary melodrama. The link between them is established after a miracle - a alucinaçãoa which the director provides a very realistic and authentic character, as in any series of photographs of Gregory Crewdson, with Alfred Hitchcock sharing a romantic obsession, this incessant desire to control every aspect of the creative process, investing in a constant meditation on the images themselves.
In the field of photography references are also taken on a kind of homage to a number of authors who helped design the history of American iconography: the "American vernacular "by Lee Friedlander viewed as a landscape of shadows and reflections, the mundane aspect of day-to-day William Eggleston, transformed into something misterioso e desejável; a tensão psicológica e perturbadora presente nos retratos aparentemente inocentes do estilo de vida americano da autoria de Joel Sternfeld; as cenas domésticas de Philip-Lorca di Corcia, nos anos 70, que misturavam aspectos mundanos do quotidiano e uma certa teatralidade, revelando uma sensibilidade fotográfica que oscila entre a imagem documental e o efeito cinematográfico; a exploração da identidade e do isolamento nas “Untitled Film Stills”, da autoria de Cindy Sherman, no final dos anos 70. Contudo, na hora de eleger a principal referência neste domínio, Gregory Crewdson não tem dúvidas em apontar como fonte primordial de inspiração as composições surrealistas da fotógrafa Diane Arbus - cujo trabalho retrata com mestria as ansiedades do povo Americano e inspirou profundamente o fotógrafo norte-americano, nomeadamente na construção de uma narrativa visual e na abordagem ao lado mais sombrio do Sonho Americano.
Aos quarenta e seis anos, Gregory Crewdson ocupa já um lugar único na história da fotografia contemporânea, ao lado de Jeff Wall, Nan Goldin ou Cindy Sherman – artists who transformed their art in a total aesthetic experience. Gone are the days of the first photography classes at Purchase College in New York. Today, the scenarios ethereal and mortified by the urgencies of human nature gained direction and opened a new chapter in the history of American iconography. Count on the fingers of one hand the artists who have dived with this intensity and passion in the imagination of a nation. And, after all, the American people thanks.
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