From Our Archives: Gregory Crewdson
“Untitled (Ophelia)”, 2001. © Gregory Crewdson. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
This interview was originally featured in Issue No. 4 - Connections
Sabrina Wirth: Your photographs are very cinematic, and I know you love movies. Which ones do you think have inspired your artwork the most?
Gregory Crewdson: Well, there is a long list of movies. I would say... Alfred Hitchcock films, but I would point out especially Vertigo, it’s one of the most beautiful movies ever made. And maybe Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind... which has a direct reference to my work and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Which is the film that chiefly inspired me when I was in graduate school.
SW: What is the most important lesson you learned from grad school?
GC: That’s really where I began attempting to combine different elements of documentary and cinematic production. It was an important time in that it was really the place where it all came together. And it was when I first started thinking about lighting and other cinematic production for my work. If you look back at my earlier pictures, they are all in a very early way showing an interest that I’m still concerned with so many years later.
SW: You used a crew?
GC: I wasn’t working with production crews. But narrative and story telling, and lighting and color were still major parts of my work.
“Untitled (19)”, 2009. © Gregory Crewdson. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
SW: What were your photographs like before Yale?
GC: Rudimentary, elemental. It wasn’t until Yale that they came together aesthetically.
SW: When I look at your photographs, I feel like I’m inside a whole other world—an altered reality. The images seem to be capturing a scene that is neither in the beginning nor the end, but rather in a state of limbo—in the middle. What draws you to these types of images?
GC: The films that I mentioned, they all in different ways very much shaped my pictures, but in as many ways as my pictures are similar to movies they are also very different. Unlike a movie, as I should point out, that moves forward in time, a still photograph is just present at each moment. So there is no before and after in the photographs. In that way, any story can be told in a photograph, condensed, and remain elusive in a way. But rather than that being a limitation, I try to make that the meaning of each picture. In other words, I am interested in moments that don’t resolve and remain open-ended questions.
SW: Is there any connection between the types of photographs you create and your personal life?
GC: My pictures aren’t autobiographical in a literal sense, in that, they’re not directly related to actual things that happen to me, but that being said, there’s always a relationship between life and art, and so in a more kind of elusive or psychological way, my pictures reflect my ephemeral psychological anxieties or desires, or whatever might be. And particularly, an overarching theme in the work is a sense of loneliness or of being alone. But also of wanting to make a connection.
“Untitled (Spooky Garage)”, 1998-2002. © Gregory Crewdson. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
SW: You have about, I think, four different styles of photography that you have done in the past. Your early work, with the tableaus, the dioramas you’ve created, then your Fireflies, the cinematic work- Close Encounters and Twilight- and then you have your most recent photographs from Rome, which are a huge departure since they are not even in the United States. Would you say that each of the changes in those styles directly correlate with different points in your life or were you experimenting with different styles?
GC: I think that it’s part of the artist’s job to continually try to reinvent yourself and to try and dramatically change the nature of your work. But that being said, I think that all the ways of making pictures or the different series are all connected despite the surface differences and photographic styles and production value. I would say that all the pictures respect a different versions of the same story. They’re all interested in exploring the uncanny and they’re all interested in the psychological exploration of place. As much as you try, you can’t ever quite get away from yourself.
“Untitled (Shane)”, 2006. © Gregory Crewdson. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
To view the full interview, visit Issue No. 4 - Connections
