レス・ザン・ゼロ（リストボーイズ）

Photography Posting this again as many of the Twilight works are images I go back to more than often. In the late 1990s, an artist named Gregory Crewdson started to cause a stir in the photography and contemporary art circles. His new tableaus of everyday suburban life seemed like clips taken out of a full length movie. And they sort of were! Crewdson had started working on an image making method that was never seen before. When you encountered his images, everything looked real, plausible. What the photographic medium was supposed to be doing, documenting, was being done, but it was all created and orchestrated for the camera. Every object, every light, every person and even this flooded room had been deliberately created by the mind of an artist and a crew of dozens of creatives working for the image to manifest itself. In art we talk about disruption, innovation and revolutionary artistic gestures, and for me, what Crewdson did is a clear example of doing all of the above and changing the medium of photography forever. His gestures expanded the way we thought of photography as art. Art can be many things. I feel a propensity for works that challenge me visually, conceptually. After the great success of Twilight, a flood gate of questions about what photography was, is and could be ensued. We witnessed a rearranging of the way photography as art could be. The “decisive moment” didn’t have to be found anymore, it could be created on a sound stage with a set designer, art director, director of photography and one artist with an exciting idea. When I first encountered Crewdson’s work I remember asking my teacher, “how can that be a photograph if it is all created for the camera?!”. My understanding to that day of what photography was supposed to be and do, was to act as a witness to reality as it unfolded in front of you. I was mind blown, and surely enough, the impact was so great that I stopped photographing “reality” and went into my staged photography phase. I wanted to “create” my own photographs; have the things happen as I wanted them to happen. It wasn’t easy!!! 20 years later after that first encounter, I’ve seen hundreds of other photographers walk those same paths, but there will only ever be one Crewdson. It would be a fair assessment that most photographers that take images that have some sort of staged component, use conscious or subconsciously ideas from Crewdson: we all want the epic and open narratives. The beautiful lighting. The sharpness of the 8x10 camera. The feeling of the ordinary becoming extraordinary. The capture of the strange glamour of everyday life. For years after my first encounter with his work and having become a photography teacher, I would purposely present his work on the first day of any workshop as a way to shake of the preconceptions students had of what can be done with photography, an almost always, it worked. From high school students to engineers, everyone dropped their guard when confronted with these Twilight images. For many, their understanding of photography as art started with Gregory's images, which is crazy to think about. This medium is so multifaceted as both a technology and as art, that it has always carried a tension of how to "read" these photographs... and I love that tension!