Moving Pictures: Waiting to Create the Perfect Moment with Photographer Gregory Crewdson

28Sep/090

Moving Pictures: Waiting to Create the Perfect Moment with Photographer Gregory Crewdson

“I do not have a kind of literal story for any of my pictures. My photographs exist between a before and after moment,” Gregory Crewdson told the filmlinc blog during a visit to the Film Society offices last Thursday. This year’s festival poster, comprised of images by Crewdson and designed by Karen Weeks, encompasses two different vantage points of a single evocative image.

In one version of the poster is an image from Crewdson’s acclaimed series “Beneath the Roses,” of a young woman on a swing on a destitute lot amidst the green hills of northwestern Massachusetts.

The second version of the poster tweaks the viewer’s experience of the evocative, romantic image by revealing the rather large crew lighting and shooting the scene. While the first image reaches far past the frame with suspended narrative possibility, the second tells a different story, of the tremendous effort involved in bringing an artist’s vision onto the public stage.

When I told Crewdson how much his image brought back memories of years spent working on independent films, he told me that I might recognize many members of his crew. An anomaly among photographers, Crewdson’s epic vision requires epic resources. Like a film director, he works closely with his trusted Director of Photography, Rick Sands, to bring his large-scale productions to life. “We rarely have to speak,” he says of his collaborator.

Despite the scale of the undertaking, serendipity and luck still figure into Crewdson’s process. Of the photo’s young subject, he said: “I knew exactly what type of person I wanted to photograph. I had the hardest time trying to figure out who it was going to be and then miraculously this young girl came walking out of the forest. And I felt like that was fateful, a sort of magical moment.”

The behind-the-scenes photograph that comprises the second part of the poster has never been exhibited, but came to be part of the project through a discussion between the artist and Mara Manus, the Executive Director of the Film Society.

In term of influences, Crewdson mentioned heavyweight chroniclers of Americana from a diverse set of disciplines: the short-story writer Raymond Carver, the painter Edward Hopper and the filmmaker David Lynch. Like Carver and Lynch, the artist is able to elicit powerful responses in the viewer through what he leaves out of the frame. For that reason, he doesn’t assign a past or a future to the young woman pictured in the image. “I think if it’s a mystery to me, then it’s a mystery to the viewer. Even if I did have a strong idea of what it was about, I think it’s better that the viewer brings their own narrative to it.”

While the artist shares much with the typical filmmaker's process, he does appreciate the way the immense effort poured into a single image can yield some liberating possibilities. “For every way these pictures are like a movie, they’re also not like a movie," said Crewdson We’re always only working toward one image, which is in some way a great privilege. We don’t have to sacrifice in the same way. We’re waiting to create the perfect moment.”

-Amanda McCormick

Moving Pictures is the filmlinc blog's occasional series on the intersection of film and art in the city and beyond. See more in our archives.