Initial artist research

I've decided to start my research by looking at Gregory Crewdon, an American photography best known for his elaborately set up scenes exploring composition and colour, and seeking out the tensions between the familiar and the strange. He's a photography, but he doesn't use a camera, not in the sense of just whipping one out and snapping an opportunity that presents itself. Instead Crewdon has a completely difference method of taking photos, in which he produces the photos himself, either on location or using a sound stage. With location he hunts around potential areas for inspiration and then begins a huge process with his production team, often taking five weeks just to produce one photograph. While he has more freedom with a sound stage, he is often most inspired by actually being on location.

I love the contrast between them, where safe, secure reality meats the unusual, the strange, and the paranormal. I think they're beautiful and brilliant. I like the mystery enfolded in a single shot, if you look at the composition of the photo above for instance, you've got questions fresh in your mind, who is the woman? Is she dead? Alive? Why? The sense of it being real, and yet not real makes me think back to working on my fairy tale project.

I can see connections in his work to Edward Hopper, an american artist born in 1882. He was influenced alot by his trips to Europe in much the same way as Crewdon was influenced by locations he came across in his wonderings '[America] seemed awfully crude and raw when I got back. It took me ten years to get over Europe.' Hopper's work definately walks on the side of mystery, like a snapshot of an event or memory we can only guess at or try to interpret. The most obvious difference with Crewdon's work is that Hopper used paint, while Crewdon uses photography, but you can argue that both put in an equal amount of hard work, Crewdon with setting up the production of the photo and Hopper with painting. There are definitely similarities in theme and composure, both looking at people in fairly ordinary circumstances with a twist.

'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.'


Further artist research:

René Magritte

A Belgian surreal artist, born in 1898, his Mother committed suicide in a river when he was 13 years old. Several of his artworks are credited to have been influenced by her death, featuring clothes over people's heads and faces, as she supposedly had her dress covering her face when her body was taken from the water. Magritte is most renowned for his witty, humorous work and optical illusions using paint.

He began as an impressionist artist, studying at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and his early paintings dictate this style, however, he found the instructions he was given dull and tedious, and he felt overall uninspired. He joined the surrealist group after his first exhibition in 1927 proved a failure, introduced to the movement by his friend André Breton, and it was with surrealism that he art truly flourished.

My experiments

For my experimental photos, I decided to try Magritte's style of uring clothes over people's faces, but instead of using paint, using my camera and props around me. The photos are therefore staged, in a similar way to both Crewdson and Hopper's method of setting up a scene, but not quite on the same massive scale of production:

I like the last two photos best as they put me most in mind of Crewdson's work, where he's used lighting to great effect in creating atmosphere. I think the lighting in these photos is extremely effective in lighting up the scenes, and despite the facial features being covered, there is real emotion in the figures' postures, a closeness and bond that is illustrated through body language, that's something that really interests me about them, and reflects on Magritte's own cloth work, like the painting further above with the two covered faces kissing. It's the suggestion of emotion beneath the covered features which give the photos their contextual value. The top two however lack the right lighting, and don't bring out the covered face so much, although I think they're still interesting contextually.