mardi 21 septembre 2010

Emulation of Gregory Crewdson: Final Results

Unfortunately, since I don't give a cinema crew, a gigantic studio, hundreds of thousands dollars, a large format camera, art directors, stylists and lighting assistants, I did my emulation with many exposures of ambiant light and flashes. It was pretty much impossible to get the same ''dreamy'' feel but I get something more dramatic and still a bit similar in the spirit of his work. I hope you like it, because there is probably almost 20 hours of work into it:



I also posted older stuff I've done that is similar. My favorite one (I find it even better than what I've done for this assignment) is the one with the girl and her gas tank:





jeudi 9 septembre 2010

Gregory Crewdson







When Roy Hartling showed us this photographer in our Studio II class, I immediately fell in love with his work and it instantly had an impact of my photography. It was very hard to limit myself with my examples because every single picture Crewdson produces is a masterpiece. I love every of them and just type his name in Google Images to get more. In my opinion he is one of the best photographer of all time. His pictures have always an interesting and perfect lighting mixed with a huge amount of details, rich colors and strange things happening. Enough of my opinion, let's talk about him and his style.

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer born in Brooklyn New York and is 47 years old making him a contemporary photographer as most of his work is after the 80's. His father was a psychanalyst so that is why he is interested into doing dreamy pictures, often said to be the dark face of the American Dream. Sometimes his pictures are done in studio and sometimes he just does them in New-England suburbs. They always have an enormous budget behind and every single detail is planned. The lighting equipment is enormous and sometimes he fakes a time of the day with it (an artificial dusk). He works with an army of decorators, stylists and lighting specialists but he is the mastermind behind all of this.

In most of his pictures, the models look absent, livid and are captured in their most intense moment of loneliness. The subjects are always in harmony with their environment and are placed to make them easily seen. Everything is made to look like a movie scene where we missed the beginning of the story. Crewdson often leaves the viewers enough detail to make up a story but he also likes to leave a big part of mystery to leave people confused. The main goal is to have the viewer asking more questions than answering answers. Overall all his series are about the ''boringness'' of the typical American Dream life.

Surprisingly, Crewdson seems to use a view camera and complicated continuous lighting setups. For his inspiration, he named Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Stephen Spielberg and David Lynch.

Since I can't have a cinema crew with me what I will do (and what I have also done in the past) is I will use my widest lens and create dreamy scenes where my subject will look lost. I will also try to get rich colors and will do many exposures with flashes to get the same effect of ambient light everywhere. I will also try to make the viewer make his own story and make him ask questions. Since it takes about 3 hours to build an image like that in Photoshop I might not be able to get 5 pictures by the deadline so I might post already a couple of my pictures that are already very similar to Crewdson's work. Overall, I will do some composites of night and evening scenes with a dramatic yet interesting lighting on my subject who will look lost or absorbed.