Garden Lovers

For this post I want to delve a little deeper into a picture photo artist Gregory Crewdson captured back in 2004 for his Beneath the Rose series.

Though the image of the naked couple lying on the mattress is outdoors, in the twilight hours, they don't appear to be feeling the effects of any cold temperatures in this photo. After all I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be there if they didn’t want to be. Are they naturists? Have they enjoyed a fine warm day and now wait until it gets just that bit colder before retiring inside for the evening? If so this would be a problem for many of suburbia’s conservative population. Clearly they are in view of neighbours’ windows and could easily be seen but these two characters seem indifferent to that. They look relaxed, but they also appear in contemplative mood. However they themselves at this moment in time aren’t overly interested in one another, they are deep and lost in their own personal thoughts, they aren’t even looking at each other. There is a subtle remoteness about them. Or perhaps these two are just simply uninhibited lovers having just made love and now enjoy a post love making moment. If they aren’t talking then are their thoughts more serious, assessing their relationship in their own minds - ‘what is this relationship all about?’ ‘Where are we now?’ ‘Where will we be in a few months time?’

Returning to the intrinsic value of his work Crewdson’s photographs have even been linked to both Hitchcock and David Lynch . It is an understandable comparison. Contained within some of Crewdson’s pictures is this suspenseful thriller plot which has a dark, some times sinister and some times haunting undercurrent. This is further enriched with the addition of a very Lynch style layer of surreal apprehension. All of these layers augmenting the whole picture provides the viewer with a compelling, engaging and often enigmatic challenge for which the ultimate reward of rising to the challenge is the numerous maybe even endless plots each reader takes away with them.

Crewdson admits that cinematography is influential to his work. For his Twilight series (1999-2000) he states that Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounter’s Of The Third Kind was influential although not consciously. The challenge for the observer often arises not in trying to read what the photograph has captured but for the meaning of the photograph to be fully explained is found by reading what the picture is depicting. There is a strong narrative element to Crewdson’s pictures therefore the reader becomes naturally curious and wants to know more. His work does not generally fit into the realist theory of art and photography where ‘the camera should be used for the recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpating flesh’. However, in a challenge to realism what he attempts to represent is something objective and real despite overt expressionistic subjective connotations. His photographs have managed to achieve a unique blurring of the distinction between reality and fiction and have made a significant contribution to photography in the expressionism arena.