visual codec archives »
one shot project »
one shot specifications »
one shot purchasing »
about us »
contributors »
submissions »
contact us »
Striking Distance
By Nate Lippens
Catherine Opie recently gave a lecture at the Tacoma Art Museum in which she spoke with good-humored urgency of photography as being in crisis. Opie is concerned that advances in phototechnology — coupled with a notable shift to digital format — are sidelining what she considers to be authentic photographic art. For example, large-scale manufacturers such as Fuji are discontinuing certain types of color film, which, in turn, is causing the obsolescense of certain printing techniques.
Opie's subtext had to do with the degree of verisimilitude available via the digital format, and she is not alone in her apprehension. Many question where photography will go with Adobe® Photoshop® as a guide.
The photographer who popped to mind as an example was Gregory Crewdson. He's both a caution for those with misgivings about the new frontier as well as a kind of rebuttal for those with faith in what it can provide.
Crewdson is famous for his meticulously crafted large-scale digital color photographs, which draw inspiration from film, painting, and advertising. His images compress the melodrama of an entire movie into a single, elaborately constructed scene. They are art imitating popular culture rather than life, and because of that they possess an instant familiarity.
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (North by Northwest)
Summer, 2004, Digital C-print, 64.25 x 94.25 in, Edition 5 of 6
Image courtesy of the artist and the Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles
For some, that familiarity breeds equally instant contempt. The images certainly cannot be what Opie had in mind when she spoke of authenticity, but they are, in fact, authentic in their fraudulence. Crewdson's verisimilitude lies in his constancy to artificial fabrication.
Seven of Crewdson's most recent images are on display at Reed College's Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery as part of New Trajectories II: Expansions, an exhibit highlighting photography from the Ovitz Family Collection.
Yes, that's entertainment executive Michael Ovitz, and yes, Crewdson's work is an obvious choice not simply because of its devotion to film references, but also because Ovitz's collection includes everything from early motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge to seminal documentary work by Robert Frank to provocateurs such as Andreas Gursky.
Crewdson and Candida Höfer, who has two photographs in the exhibition, are representatives, each in their singular way, of the divergent path the still image has taken since shifting from its photojournalism heritage.
New Trajectories II is a follow-up to an exhibit of paintings, prints, and sculptures from Ovitz's collection. For the sequel, Cooley director Stephanie Snyder fixated on constructed environments, showcasing seven Crewdson prints made in the last two years as well as the two works by Höfer.
In the exhibit, men stand alone, marooned in wrecked living rooms; women pale as flames hold fistfuls of roses with broken stems on beds smeared with dirt; and everywhere extraterrestrial light blazes as if God's flashlight were bearing down on the scene.
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Backyard Romance)
Summer, 2004, Digital C-print, 64.25 x 94.25 in, Edition 5 of 6
Image courtesy of the artist and the Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles
The subjects in Crewdson's work seem blank, numbed-out, living in landscape vacuums left by some loss. In a way, they are ciphers, blank screens that you can project onto, which likens them to movie actors. And while we can postulate that each human individual is an endangered species, in Crewdson's photos the extinction seems to have already happened. Subjects are either living in the aftermath of the rapture or some small apocalypse, or perhaps they are the undead, ritualistically revisiting a family fight or an empty street.
If the very unknowability of experience constitutes its ultimate beauty, then these individuals are ravishing. But you couldn't go so far as to say they embody real lives — not in the sense of the portraiture of, say, someone like Katy Grannan.
Crewdson's work blends the normal and the paranormal. The polarities evaporate, as with W.G. Sebald's essay "Campo Santo" in which he parses the Corsican tradition of integrating ghosts and apparitions in everyday life; a rabbit carcass is left as a reminder of a dead loved one's presence.
At the end of the piece, Sebald fusses with the idea that we no longer have room for the dead in our lives. Crewdson clearly has room for it in his work. The special effects he employs — elaborate sets, a crew of dozens, 100 lights to get the spectral glow just right — are all at the service of capturing an otherness that feels haunted.
And speaking of a crew of dozens, one of the major criticisms leveled at Crewdson is that he may as well just make films. However, while Crewdson may use cinematic visual language, the sweep, the motion is gone. Crewdson's inspirations may be Steven Spielberg and David Lynch, but they are also Edward Hopper and Renaissance paintings; he is concerned with the still and exacting moment of the photograph, much as Cindy Sherman is with her elaborately staged compositions.
At their best, the production and artifice of Crewdson's photographs recede and the viewer is lost in another world, remarkably drawn from the same matter as our own, but somehow both more and less than what we are accustomed to calling reality.
