G R E G O R Y C R E W D S O N : B E N E AT H T H E R O S E S
BY RUSSELL BANKS
The frequently made comparisons of Crewdson’s work to the movies—Steven Spielberg, Wes to announce and advance them, nullify both memory and hope. We can’t bring our personal pasts,
Anderson, David Lynch, etc.—are suggestive and derive from the “look” of the pictures, which our memories and erasures, our fantasies and denials, our dream lives and our nightmares to the
resemble no visual artifact made by man so much as 1950s Technicolor movie stills posted in movies and plug them into the narrative, using the material of our secret inner lives to fill out and
the lobby of the Palace Theater in Lake Placid, New York, or the Star in Concord, New Hamp- amplify the fast-moving, sound-tracked imagery on the screen and give it personal meaning, the
shire, or the Capitol in Montpelier, Vermont. The small-town theaters of my boyhood and ado- way we do when, silently, slowly, in complete control of our rate of perception, we read a novel. Or
lescence. They’re like stop-action shots, inviting one, obliging one, especially perhaps if one is the way we do when we peer into the photographs made by Gregory Crewdson.
an adolescent boy, to concentrate on the details. For as much as Crewdson’s secret inner life is surely revealed by his photographs, on
The comparisons to movies derive also from the way in which the contents of the pictures viewing them one’s own secret inner life is necessarily revealed, too—at least to oneself. And
are assembled and staged—the special way in which the photographs are made. They do not revelation produces change. Movies do many things to and for us; but they almost never change
conceal their staging (the staging, its artificiality, is practically flaunted), but like movies they us. Not at the moment of viewing, anyhow. Later, maybe, they can, after they’ve been stored
are obviously expensive to produce and require an enormous amount of planning and huge for a while in our memory banks and have been compounded there and can be drawn upon as
crews and vast amounts of equipment and machinery. And similarly, their production depends if they were part of our remembered experience of the world; as if we, too, had hung out with
upon trust and collaboration among many people with many different skills and types of exper- Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca in 1944 or had watched Atlanta burn. Simply, we don’t bring
tise. They are assembled like soundstages, most of them built in and around the decaying mill that part of ourselves to the experience of going to the movies. Movies provide no half-completed
town of North Adams, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with the characters (and they are charac- alternative reality ready to have its blanks filled in; no fictional world where we can reside long
ters, rather than subjects) played by local citizens and sometimes by professional actors. A single enough to furnish it with our preexisting memories, dreams, and reflections.
shoot can force a town to reroute automobile traffic for entire days. So it’s natural to want to Further to that, a single isolated photograph by itself, even one of Crewdson’s, cannot
compare them to the movies. change the viewer or the photographer himself, any more than a single chapter from a novel can
Yet it seems to me that inasmuch as the viewer is required to do a crucial part of the creative change the reader or the novelist himself. No, you have to see or make a series of pictures; you
work him- or herself, Crewdson’s photographs engage one’s mind more like good fiction than have to read or write the entire novel. You have to expose yourself to an alternative world, a
movies. When we watch a movie, after all, we are prohibited from using our imagination. It’s not fictional world, if you will, and enter it; and not only that, you have to live there for a long time,
part of the deal. It’s all done for us. Moviegoing is essentially a passive experience. What’s on the for hours and days and weeks and even longer, years, and fill it out, and in, with your own imagin-
screen enters our eyes and ears and fills our minds entirely, leaving us with no room or choice but ings. A glance, a quick look-see, will not do it. And this is as true for the photographer himself
to check our imaginations at the door. Movies, in contrast to the glossy stills posted in the lobby as for the viewer, as true for the novelist as for his or her reader.
