Exhibition: ‘Golden Valley Faces: The photographs of Richard Jenkins’ at the Café Gallery, Hay Castle,Hay-on-Wye Installation photograph of the exhibition Duane Hanson/Gregory Crewdson: Uncanny realities at Museum Frieder Burda Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1962. He was first introduced to photography at the age of ten when his father took him to see the 1972 retrospective exhibition of Diane Arbus at the Museum of Modern Art.

The curators Götz Adriani and Patricia Kamp are not aiming at a direct confrontation. They are rather presenting two artists who work with different materials, but deal with very similar topics. Both artists, Hanson and Crewdson, are grand when it comes to arranging their art. Crewdson always puts very much effort into the arrangements of the scenes in his pictures, and Hanson always keeps an eye on his close surroundings. Influenced by Pop Art, Hanson turned to thematising everyday American life, frequently switching his observations to a critically satirical attitude that was, however, always guided by compassion. Housewives, construction workers, car salesmen, or janitors – the models for his figures are people in the American middle and working classes in whose biographies the disappointment in the American dream has become entrenched. He often puts his people and all of their small insufficiencies into perspective with ironic kindness, such as, for example, the Tourists, in whom are combined all of the clichés associated with the typical Florida tourist. The proximity to reality of his lifelike, detailed human figures make for perfect irritation. Despite all the seriousness hidden behind the socio-critical issue, which prompted Hanson to create his protagonists, the figures have a great deal of entertainment value, above all – and it is precisely this that makes them so appealing – due to their occasional gravitational bearing. Featuring twenty-five works, the exhibition presents a representative cross-section of the American’s extensive oeuvre, which comprises a total of only 114 works. The figures enter a dialogue with the large-format photographs by the American photo artist Gregory Crewdson, who has a flair for relating human abysses in a different and very subtle way. Everything's Gone Green Photography and the Garden, The Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradfort, England Using shots that resemble film productions, Crewdson deconstructs American suburban life in his work. [15] He has cited the films Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe as having influenced his style, [16] as well as the painter Edward Hopper [17] and photographer Diane Arbus. [18]I wish I had Gregory Crewdson’s budget and team. I envy him. I really do. I bet he has a bunch of fun thinking up the scenarios and then making the pictures happen together with his light crew, his casting people, his camera operator and director of photography (!), his actors, and so on. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with his mode of working per se, so long as its limitations are known; you can’t get reality from fiction, but then again, if literary fiction can be more true to reality than documentaries, couldn’t photographic fiction? Shouldn’t we value photographic fiction for the same reasons we value literary fiction? Yes, we should. But what I’d do with his budget is this: I’d come up with an idea. I’d build the scene every bit as rigorously as Crewdson. I’d micromanage just as much as him. I’d put a hundred lights in the scene, I’d use a huge camera that could almost capture the atoms in the nose hair of my actors. But! Then I’d do what Crewdson doesn’t dare or doesn’t want: I’d introduce spontaneity. Clearly, he has a vision. A pretty specific one, too: he’s said that every artist has one story to tell, one they keep telling over and over, which may or may not be true in general, but certainly is for Crewdson, who is often criticized for doing the same thing over and over. (Which isn’t far off: at least with Twilight and now Beneath the Roses, the themes and technique are the same. The difference seems to be that the magical and inexplicable is toned down more in the later work, and the aspect ratio has changed from 5:4 to 3:2). It’s a bleak America Crewdson imagines, one where wonder seems to be an emotional high and resentment, resignation, sadness, loneliness and quiet contemplation seem to be the emotional average. It’s easy to put it down as too depressing, but who says Crewdson is trying to give us the complete picture? I doubt it. Not long ago I praised Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger for its character portrait, all the while noting that it is the bleakest novel I know of, certainly the bleakest I’ve ever finished. Delivering a bleak and depressing message is not in and of itself grounds for criticism. Because Crewdson’s method is so cinematic, and he has close relationships with many filmmakers—Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson, to name two (he freely admits his childhood brownstone is very Baumbachian in tone)—and because the photographs have a decidedly narrative feel, almost as if they were film stills, it would seem a logical next step for him to direct a movie. He doesn’t agree. “I think in terms of single images,” he says. “My work is profoundly connected to that tradition. I really don’t know what happens before or after an image. I really have no clue.” Lubow, Arthur (August 20, 2020). "For Gregory Crewdson, Truth Lurks in the Landscape". The New York Times. The surreal photographs are dark and disquieting, filled with morose people. While naked bodies and sexuality is incorporated in several pictures, it is all portrayed in a grim manner with no love or affection shown between the participants. The indoor scenes are obviously choreographed, with great attention to the details. This artificiality made me ponder the time and money poured into creating each specific look, from finding the cars and decor of the era, to employing the actors and actresses that were never shown in a flattering light.

Exhibition: ‘Gerhard Richter. Overpainted Photographs’ Gerhard Richter Archive at Albertinum at the Staatliche KunstsammlungenDresden Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic (solo) 2008 Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico 2008 Gregory Crewdson, White Cube, London, England (solo) Gregory Crewdson: Eveningside, 2012–2022. Milan: Skira Editore, 2022. ISBN 8857248429. Text by Jean-Charles Vergne. I’m only concerned with that particular moment, the moment of the picture. I really don’t have any interest in what happens before, or what happens after. In a certain way, it’s a privilege that I don’t have to think about plot, or storyline, or character development, that I can just focus on that moment, and how to make that moment as beautiful and as mysterious as possible. The Stills Director The middle-aged women in these photographs often have the hairstyles and hardened faces of the women in Edward Hopper's later paintings. Hopper, one of Crewdson's heroes, managed infinitely more with very much less. Hopper's paintings were so stripped down to the essentials that they left more to the imagination; even the way he painted sunlight climbing the wall in a room tells us everything we need to know about time passing, futility and loneliness. Crewdson, by contrast, overloads many of his scenes. If a woman doesn't seem quite unhappy enough in a room, then throw a few antidepressants and slimming pills around the bedside table to reinforce the point, and give the room an overflowing ashtray. In America, only the fraught, the foolhardy and the neurotic smoke. It proves they're not living right.

Press + Articles

Gregory Crewdson: Disturbed Nature, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art Design, Vancouver, Canada (solo)

Gregory, Crewdson. "Aesthetics of Alienation". Tate Etc. Archived from the original on June 8, 2011 . Retrieved March 19, 2011. Duane Hanson (1925-1996) is one of the most influential American sculptors of the 20th century committed to Realism. Over the past few years, Crewdson's productions have become increasingly ambitious; his photographs sometimes require dozens of assistants and technicians, large format cameras, an array of lights, make-up and wardrobe, as well as computerised post-production. For his next show in New York, however, he has dusted off some old images he took of fireflies. "The pictures couldn't be simpler. They're elemental. They're just pictures of light made in twilight." Another way in which Crewdson’s pictures are unlike movies is that, while they mimic their look, they are tableaux rather than screenshots; they make no attempt to look like they’re taken from a larger narrative. It’s less as if you took a single frame from a movie and more as if you stopped time, as if the single moment could have lasted minutes or hours. Everyone is static. There is no movement to speak of; the actors, especially those far from the camera, might as well have been realistic dolls. This is part of what I miss in Crewdson’s pictures: a sense of life. I want the characters to live. I’m ok with getting to see only a single instant, in fact I like it that way, but I want that instant to feel as if it’s part of life, not as if it’s part of a museum installation. I want staged photography that looks slightly more like real life; I’m ok with artificial lighting, weird expressions, contrived situations, to a certain extent, but I’d love to see some movement, some signs of life. The emotional power of these pictures would quadruple easily, I think, with just a little hint that the moment before and the moment after the shutter was fired wasn’t perfectly identical with the moment captured. His photography is elaborately staged and composed, presenting a complete yet ambiguous narrative within one photograph.

Dealers

Contemporary American Photography 1970-2000, From the Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, Korea

Making Eveningside (2022) – short interpretive documentary directed by Harper Glantz, set to original music by Stuart Bogie and James Murphy (electronic musician) about the making of Eveningside O'Hagan, Sean (June 20, 2017). "Cue mist! Gregory Crewdson, the photographer with a cast, a crew and a movie-sized budget". The Guardian. London . Retrieved June 30, 2017. Crewdson regularly works with crews of 30 or more people to construct complicated sets and lighting setups. He has his own director of photography, storyboard/concept artists, photo editor and he doesn’t even operate the camera himself. Famed photographer Gregory Crewdson will present the inaugural discussion in a series sponsored by the Photography Society of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City… A survey of Crewdson’s work of the previous twenty years toured European museums from 2005 to 2008. The exhibition In a Lonely Place traveled to galleries and museums across Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand from 2011 to 2013, and a major monograph was published by Rizzoli in 2013. Crewdson’s awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship.

Monograph

In his visual mosaics Crewdson engages our relationship with time and space to challenge the trace of experience. His tableaux act as a kind of threshold or hinge of experience – between interior and exterior, viewer and photograph. His photographs are a form of monism in which two forces (interior / exterior) try to absorb each other but ultimately lead to a state of equilibrium. It is through this “play” that the context of the photographs and their relationship to each other and the viewer are “framed.” This device emphasises the aesthetic as much as information and encourages the viewer to think about the relationship between the body, the world of which it is part and the dream-reason of time.5 This intertextual (n)framing ( n meaning unspecified number in mathematics) encourages the viewer to explore the inbetween spaces in the non-narrative / meta-narrative,”and by leaps (intuitive leaps, poetic leaps, leaps of faith)”6 encourage escapism in the imagination of the viewer. It is up to us as viewers to seek the multiple, disparate significances of what is concealed in each photograph as “felt knowledge” (Walter Benjamin), recalling to mind the sensory data placed before our eyes, something that can be experienced but cannot be explained by man: “the single moment of the present amidst the transience of life and searching for some kind of eternal truth.”7 Drawing on Hopper: Gregory Crewdson/Edward Hopper, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, USA (solo) An Eclipse of Moths. New York: Aperture, 2020. ISBN 978-1683952213. With an introduction by Jeff Tweedy. Crewdson's most widely-known bodies of work include Twilight (1998–2002), Beneath the Roses (2003–2008), Cathedral of the Pines (2013–2014) and An Eclipse of Moths. [19] Crewdson's only body of work made outside of the U.S. was Sanctuary (2009), set at the abandoned Cinecittá studios outside of Rome. [20] Nearly all of his other work before and since was made in the small towns and cities in Western Massachusetts. [21]