Summary Of Twilight By Gregory Crewdson
Why is there a tree in the middle of the bedroom? This was the first thing I thought when I saw Plate 23 of Gregory Crewdson’s Twilight. When working with the photographs of Crewdson, an American photographer who often depicts homes and neighborhoods, the world may never know for sure what is occurring in the photograph. Rick Moody makes a valid point about the ambiguity of Crewdson’s photographs in the essay preceding the Twilight photo essay: “And that’s why the Twilight photographs we have before us both seem to be easy to interpret and very difficult at the same time. If you could figure a photograph out in three minutes and forty-five seconds, you wouldn’t want to look at it anymore” (Crewdson 8). Moody’s assessment of Crewdson seems
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This is where Eliade’s work on sacred and profane space can become helpful as it explains the importance of sacred spaces to religious man. Part of his argument in The Sacred and the Profane is this: “There are for example, privileged places, qualitatively different from all others--a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the ‘holy places’ of his private universe…” (Eliade 24). Though Eliade does not mention it, one’s bedroom can be seen as a privileged place, and one can use his work to theorize about what Crewdson was trying to capture with this photograph. A bedroom can be an escape from the hectic happenings of day to day life, and Crewdson’s portrayal of the destroyed sacred space shows the struggle for order and normality through the man’s appearance and continued work late into the evening. The man might be realizing in the moment captured in the picture that he cannot fix his home on his own, as Crewdson’s photos are often about revelation: “My pictures are about everyday life combined with theatrical effect. I want them to feel outside of time, to take something routine and make
This is where Eliade’s work on sacred and profane space can become helpful as it explains the importance of sacred spaces to religious man. Part of his argument in The Sacred and the Profane is this: “There are for example, privileged places, qualitatively different from all others--a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the ‘holy places’ of his private universe…” (Eliade 24). Though Eliade does not mention it, one’s bedroom can be seen as a privileged place, and one can use his work to theorize about what Crewdson was trying to capture with this photograph. A bedroom can be an escape from the hectic happenings of day to day life, and Crewdson’s portrayal of the destroyed sacred space shows the struggle for order and normality through the man’s appearance and continued work late into the evening. The man might be realizing in the moment captured in the picture that he cannot fix his home on his own, as Crewdson’s photos are often about revelation: “My pictures are about everyday life combined with theatrical effect. I want them to feel outside of time, to take something routine and make