Gregory Crewdson: An Artful Producer of Dreams

By Lucy XC Liu, Photo World Magazine, Oct 2020

LL: A fascinating entry point into the conversation about your process is location. Location as broadly speaking your attachment to the American landscape, Massachusetts, and suburbia; also specifically in your process, when you pick the location and how everything else comes after. I would love to hear about this starting point of your creative process.

GC: For me, the whole process begins with location. I spend an enormous amount of time location-scouting, going from one place to another. I think there are photographers and artists who travel widely, and there are others who are attracted to one specific place. I had always been, for whatever reason, connected to trying to photograph over and over again one geography, one landscape, trying to build my narratives. So instead of traveling wide I think of it as going deep. Of course there is a connection between the actuality of a place and something that is more imagined, more fictive. So When I am location scouting I am looking for a place that can accommodate one of my pictures. It’s hard to describe what I am looking for, but it needs to feel both familiar, but also somehow outside of time, and also feel very ordinary in a sort of way. And if I keep returning to this place over and over again, it means that there is something there for me. And I will try to imagine an image, and that is how the process starts.

LL: Yes, you talked about instincts in your documentary. About how one element keeps manifesting itself in different images over and over again, the reason always lies in something deep inside.

GC: For me, we all have our particular stories, which is that murky thing that exists within all of us——our preoccupations our obsessions our fears our desires. Then we also have the physical world. And I think for a photographer that challenge is to project that story onto the world outside of yourself. There is a collision between the self and the world around you, you know. In another way of putting it is the coming together of content and form. The challenge is to try to not only find the location that means something, but make a picture that is in a way subjective, that feels like only you could have made it. That is the biggest challenge. Because as we all know, there are photographic images are omnipresent now with social media, and we absorb images through our computer screen. But how do you make a picture in this world that feels lasting, that has a permanence to it, rather than something that is fleeting and disposable.

LL: Some art critics like to link your works to the current social condition and the American psychology, such as anxiety and the state without before and after. How evident is the social condition in your process in relationship to your work?

GC: I’ve never tried to make a social commentary in my pictures. I don’t really have an agenda in terms of a commentary, or even a political point of view. What I am trying to do is to make a picture that is powerful, beautiful and mysterious. Those are the things I really strive to do. However picture take on a new life aside of yourself, and become relevant in ways that you never could have imagined. For instance in this new body of work An Eclipse of Moths that are just about to premiere in LA. These pictures were made in 2018, but it feels absolutely relevant to where we are right now and our culture. I couldn’t have imagined that they would, and I don’t think in that way. I think only in terms to make powerful pictures that mean something.

LL: An Eclipse of Moths struck me with its sense of destruction, notably the image of the woman sitting in a burial vault as if she was sitting in a bathtub. Can you please talk about what brought you to realize it?

GC: I honestly feel that each artist has one story to tell. You go through your life, telling and retelling that story and trying to reinvent it in some way. When I was making those pictures, that picture for instance, I was definitely conscious of several things, the questions of mortality, a young relationship, but also the weird discomfort, and dislocation. The burial vault was actually found at a small foundry for burial vaults. So I first found that as a location. This is a perfect example of craving an image from a specific location. I loved how the burial vault looked, almost like a sculpture. I thought it was so interesting, this place tucked behind a trailer park, with all these cast away gravestones. There was also the stairway. It was all there. What should be happening here? I kept thinking about it. What if there was this teenage couple. And there is this girl bathing in the vault and a boy looking on. That is how the picture came. I think it was a romantic picture. 

LL: It is so painterly, especially how you describe the young couple reminds me of ancient myths and classical paintings. Do these images, as well as those by artists whom you list as your influences, continuously haunt you? 

GC: Yes, I think we all do as artists, we have an inventory of pictures that preexist us. I think “haunt” is a really good way of putting it. But it is never a conscious thing, it is only later that you kind of connect the dots. I work very intuitively actually, I am reacting to what I see. This is sort of a contradiction because I work with an entire film crew to make it come all together. At the core, my pictures are always based on something that feels very perceived, very organically made. I never think of myself like someone who makes something really artificial or constructed. I am looking for a certain kind of truth in the pictures.

LL: Can you talk about some of these influences?

GC: I think you mentioned even in your first questions that my images look very American. I think what influences me the most are artists who explore an intersection between the ordinary life and something more theatrical. Anywhere from Steven Spielberg David Lynch, to Walker Evans, Edward Hopper. All of these artists have that in common. I am building on that tradition of finding. I always say you keep absorbing these conventions in a certain way and you try to reinvent it by one degree. And that is the job of the artist. It’s like to take all those references or influences and reshape them in someway.

LL: In your earlier articles In a Lonely Place, you mentioned the Hitchcock film Vertigo and the surreal scene of the woman in blue walking toward the camera immersed in green light.

GC: Such a powerful movie, mesmerizing. Have you seen it? Would recommend. It is one of his more dreamlike and obsessive movies. It is about images in a certain way. 

LL: You are very into film, and very influenced by film. What made you firmly remain a photographer?

GC: You are right I have always loved movies, from early on, in fact that is something I really miss right now, is going to the movies. That is almost like a collective religious activity. I think photography always made a lot more sense to me, as a picture-maker, because partly I am dyslexic, I always found reading and test-taking very hard, very painful. When I took my first photography class there was something about the still image that made perfect sense to me, photography was something that I knew how to read it in a certain way. It wasn’t only linear. I think in terms of still images. Although I love movies, I could never imagine making a movie. It is beyond my comprehension in terms of the linear thought. From early early on, I’d say when I was a young student, my ambition was to take certain cinematic qualities and bring it into the still picture, and that’s what I’ve done.

LL: Perhaps a still image allows for more details? For example, your series Beneath the Roses were printed at a very large scale, and the viewers just start noticing more details as they observe for longer. 

GC: There are so many big differences between films and still photographs, but one of them is the different way of storytelling. The photograph is a frozen moment without before and after, when a film holds in time. I always saw the limitation of the still photograph as interesting because you could try to put everything you can into it and make It as perfect as possible. Every little part of it is considered. You can never make a movie like that. Nor that you would want to.

LL: Could you please tell us more about these details and technical elements that make the picture? I saw a time-lapse video of Redemption Center from your series An Eclipse of Moths on Instagram. It was so complicated and overwhelming!

GC: That is how I make my pictures. It is really the only way I know how to make pictures. That’s a process I came up with after years. I wouldn’t know how to make a picture otherwise. But for me it always comes down to the light in the end. That is why we go through an enormous amount of time and energy to make it right, to choreograph the light. In the end it is all in the service of telling the story and creating the world. 

LL: I love how you spin a little yarn here and there in your photographs. In Redemption Center, I noticed there were flower petals in the puddle. I was observing the reflection on the puddle…and I don’t think it looks right. You must have done something to it.

GC: (Laughs) Very perceptive. We do a special lighting effect and a focus just for the puddle, and we composite it. Sometimes, we do a special lighting for inside a car. In the picture with a police officer holding a flashlight, that was adding a special effect. There are different instances when that manipulation happens. 

LL: I appreciate the quote by Jeff Kipnis that your photos are “the first case of an artful production of dreams in the history of art.” How do you see your process of reinventing something, whether aspired to or tumbled upon? 

GC: In every picture, things unexpected happen. There are always things you never expect or things that go wrong, and there always has to be a surprise. Always. Otherwise it is not worth making a picture. If it comes out exactly how you want it to, then there is probably something wrong. Something necessarily has to go wrong to make it right. 

LL: Do you feel disappointed? How do you feel when something goes in a way you didn’t want it to be?

GC: Well, I am always disappointed. No matter what. Because, you see it one way and when you get the results it would be different. Then you would have to rebuild it. For example, post production is a way of reinvention, you can bring it back to life in a certain way and that takes months to do. 

LL: As an educator, what would your advice be to photographers and artists, especially younger photographers and artists in this time?

GC: I think the thing you must do is carrying on as artists and making pictures, because that is the way you’ll understand and make sense of this chaotic world. Part of the job of the artist is to try to represent and create a kind of stability and order within life.