Gregory Crewdson's Photography - a Mirror for Self-reflection

“There has always been, while I was making the photographs, this blurring of reality and fiction.”

This quote from an interview with Gregory Crewdson reflects exactly how I feel about my reality right now. Is there any reality left beyond the boundaries of my own four walls? Does reality exist beyond the borders of Australia? It all seems like an unattainable fiction. And then there’s fiction generated by our own minds, of course. In the absence of any (real) outside stimulation, the mind tends to go wild.

Crewdson’s photographs are speaking to me more than ever. It’s their stillness, no doubt, that resonates. But not just that.

Crewdson creates these uncanny, complex, totally constructed worlds – snapshots of narratives that never happened. Characters that never existed. The magic happens when WE interact with the image. When OUR minds engage with the characters. We breathe life into them and make them come alive.

Crewdson does not infuse any meaning or presupposed narrative into his photographs and this is exactly what makes them so potent for us, the viewers. We superimpose our experiences, emotions, preconceived notions, prejudices onto these frozen moments in nonexistent time.

“…What's important to me is that there's a necessary alienation between me and the subject. I don't want to know them well, I don't want to have any intimate contact with them… Since a photograph is frozen and mute, since there is no before and after, I don't want there to be a conscious awareness of any kind of literal narrative… I want to privilege the moment. That way, the viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture.”

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