Wednesday 2 December 2009

Gregory Crewdson... Twilight...



Begun in 1998 and completed in 2002, Twilight consists of forty photographs created as elaborately staged, large-scale tableaux that explore the relationship between the domestic and the fantastical, between the North American landscape and the topology of the imagination. These filmic images strongly reference TV programmes such as The Twilight Zone or films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind that deal with fanatsy and the paranormal. In crewdson's photographs a collision between the normal and the paranormal exists which serves to transform the fmailiar suburban landscape into a place of wonder and anxiety. In these photographs, the paternal goodwill of the small-town becomes something far darker and sinister. In this series Crewdson employs a cinematic, directorial mode of photography, the culmination of weeks of planning and complicated, behind-the-scenes production.
Twilight is one of my favourite from Crewdson's series of work. Straight away you can see his fim influences and how well he's 'directed' these photographs to follow a paticular style, in this case, a sense of eerieness. I like the way the 'perfection' of suburban America is contrasted with the idea that somethings out of place or missing, which gives it an overall eerie feeling. It's also the idea that these photographs are shot at twilight which exposes the people when they least expect it, when they're most vulnerable. My favourite image in this series is probably the one with the little girl and the school bus because it is eerieness at its best. We've seen similar scenes in films, but this image is frozen in oppose to film, so we want something to happen, but it doesn't. I will definitely be looking at this series of work closely throughout this project because a lot of my ideas aim to follow a similar sense of eerieness and present something which seems out of place, although i won't be using people, but objects to portray this.

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