05/05/08
Text: Christine Noblejas
Gregory Crewdson has said he neatly divides his life into three categories: pre-production, production, and post-production. In order to tell his latest pictorial tale, Crewdson employed snow makers, fire engines, cranes, and a multitude of film-oriented staff for four seasonal cycles 2006-2007. In the aftermath, he was left with a plethora of shots from his 8 by 10 large format camera, which he purposefully left in a singular stationary position in order to splice together negatives with varying focus on foreground and background to achieve a final image of hyper-clarity in post-production. But Gregory Crewdson’s crisp photographs are more than mere windows into the lives of small town Americana- they’re transparent snow globes, simultaneously intimate while being undeniably staged. In many cases, the viewer feels more like an invested higher being rather than a voyeur, as the distanced height of the photos leaves human figures dwarfed with nearly inscrutable facial expressions. And yet, a sense of worry is instilled by the moment of anticipation he presents, as the viewer is left beckoning for the figure to leap into action and resolve, but as is the case with a snow globe, one is only given fake snow falling on an inanimate scene. His careful attention to “lighting and palette” – the only tools photographers have at their disposal according to Crewdson- even employ the same warm ambient yellow lights emitting from windows of the traditionally Utopian style Tchotchke. Perhaps this point recalls Crewdson’s use of yellow stop lights in earlier streetscapes, indicating his desire to depict transition, in-between moments. And yet, Crewdson has literally flipped the otherwise Norman Rockwell Americana of a snow globe on its head, suspending it in its darker moments of dysfunction and loneliness. From a moose and a man on an empty street to a silent woman detached from the fetal child that shares her bed, lone figures in vast scenery of dank, dirty snow are frozen over in Crewdson’s recurring small, provincial town. These hauntingly silent images are now on view in Beverly Hills at the Gagosian Gallery till June 7, 2008.
