More Crewdson Nonsense

Fireflies - Gregory Crewdson

The more I look at Crewdson's work the more I find I love and hate it in almost equal measure.  The hate comes from his corporate work of the last decade.  I just find Twilight and Dream House so depressing and yet so fascinating.   Love him or loath him you have got to accept that he insists on the highest production values for his images.   Note that I don't say for the images he makes because that would simply not be a correct statement.   I have spent sometime thinking about how to describe Crewdson and I think the best way to do this is 'an artist'.   I really do have difficulty seeing him as a photographer.   However, it can equally be argued that this is the point of his work - to be ambiguous and so his input and role are ambiguous.

And then I see the wonderful images contained in Fireflies and again I have to start to question my assessment of Crewdson.  These are a series of images of fireflies Crewdson tried to capture in the summer of 1996.   They are simple black and white images taken at dusk of the patterns left by the fire flies as they fly across the summer vegetation.   They are marvelous.  They look like fairies dancing in the warm summer evening.   Entrancing.   Gone are the obsession with precision and instead we have a more free flowing image of nothing more than white blobs.   They are the better for this.    I have been reading about David Shepherd's attempt to capture the last days of steam in Britain.   He claims that his beautiful oil sketches capture the atmosphere of the time in a way that photographs can't.  I am not sure this is entirely true but it does indicate what Crewdson's later images lack - atmosphere.

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