Gregory Crewdson Beneath The Roses Analysis
Introduction
My biggest concern with documentary photography is that there exists the notion that documentary photography should be truthful. During my studies I’ve learned allot about narratives and photographic strategies, but little has been mentioned about ethics. Documentary photography has been described as a form, a tradition and a style however there is not one single definition of the word. I’m interested in the line between the photograph as a document of something and the photograph as an artistic expression. When is the manipulation of a photograph tolerated when the photographer is working within documentary photography traditions and what are the exact boundaries that photographers are allowed to work within?
The term documentary …show more content…
More importantly he focuses on emphasising the differences rather than acknowledging any relation between the two photographers. Banks compares Crewdson’s work to movie stills and places Crewdson’s work somewhere between movies and literary fiction, but notes that Crewdson’s work lives in it’s own perfect “incompleteness”. He goes on by noting that Wall’s work, as well as that of Cindy Sherman’s, is “complete” in comparison to that of Crewdson although all three used similar staging processes. This “completeness” is due to the fact that the work of Wall and Sherman claims to tell the whole story; whatever is left outside the picture is rendered insignificant. This does not account for the work of Crewdson however, whose “beginning, middle and end lie elsewhere outside the …show more content…
However if we assume that Crewdson’s images resemble big budget Blockbuster movies, then Wall would be the equivalent of an indie film. It’s also interesting to note that while Gursky does not use the same “movie-like” processes, Gursky’s work is also largely dependent on showing us things in the world that we already know, but now in a global form. It’s exactly this enlargement of what is already familiar that links Gursky to Crewdson and Wall.
Peter Galassi’s essay on Jeff Wall examines Wall’s development as an artist starting out with painting and sooner or later arriving in the 1990s when Wall began working with digital montage.
Wall describes his work as having two broad areas. In one style the artifice of the photograph is made obvious by the nature of his stories. Wall has utilised digital manipulation since the 1980s to create this effect. The other area is the staging of an event that appears to be much more candid. A fine example of the latter is Passerby, a black and white photograph with a figure turned and moving away from the camera. By utilising a snapshot aesthetic the image feels much more candid and improvised.
I find it interesting that Galassi also notes that Wall’s images are “complete”. To understand this, we must understand Barthes’ ideas on what makes a photograph stand
My biggest concern with documentary photography is that there exists the notion that documentary photography should be truthful. During my studies I’ve learned allot about narratives and photographic strategies, but little has been mentioned about ethics. Documentary photography has been described as a form, a tradition and a style however there is not one single definition of the word. I’m interested in the line between the photograph as a document of something and the photograph as an artistic expression. When is the manipulation of a photograph tolerated when the photographer is working within documentary photography traditions and what are the exact boundaries that photographers are allowed to work within?
The term documentary …show more content…
More importantly he focuses on emphasising the differences rather than acknowledging any relation between the two photographers. Banks compares Crewdson’s work to movie stills and places Crewdson’s work somewhere between movies and literary fiction, but notes that Crewdson’s work lives in it’s own perfect “incompleteness”. He goes on by noting that Wall’s work, as well as that of Cindy Sherman’s, is “complete” in comparison to that of Crewdson although all three used similar staging processes. This “completeness” is due to the fact that the work of Wall and Sherman claims to tell the whole story; whatever is left outside the picture is rendered insignificant. This does not account for the work of Crewdson however, whose “beginning, middle and end lie elsewhere outside the …show more content…
However if we assume that Crewdson’s images resemble big budget Blockbuster movies, then Wall would be the equivalent of an indie film. It’s also interesting to note that while Gursky does not use the same “movie-like” processes, Gursky’s work is also largely dependent on showing us things in the world that we already know, but now in a global form. It’s exactly this enlargement of what is already familiar that links Gursky to Crewdson and Wall.
Peter Galassi’s essay on Jeff Wall examines Wall’s development as an artist starting out with painting and sooner or later arriving in the 1990s when Wall began working with digital montage.
Wall describes his work as having two broad areas. In one style the artifice of the photograph is made obvious by the nature of his stories. Wall has utilised digital manipulation since the 1980s to create this effect. The other area is the staging of an event that appears to be much more candid. A fine example of the latter is Passerby, a black and white photograph with a figure turned and moving away from the camera. By utilising a snapshot aesthetic the image feels much more candid and improvised.
I find it interesting that Galassi also notes that Wall’s images are “complete”. To understand this, we must understand Barthes’ ideas on what makes a photograph stand