I know I’ve lifted the title from Gregory Crewdon’s great series of images – it’s on purpose as this image put me in mind of him.
The only thing missing from my image is something the destabilise it like a shard of diffuse light. But I wasn’t making a copy of his work, it is just that this shared similarities.
If you don’t know Crewdson’s work I can heartily recommend it. In Twilight, which is probably the work Crewdson is most famous for, you can see the style he is most well known for. The work is beguiling and wonderful and one can spend a long time just pondering different photos and aspects within them. Many – almost all – have a very strong narrative content.
Martin Hochleitner[1] has written eloquently about how Crewdson uses light in much of his work. Light figures in the photos in ways that Hochleitner classifies as natural, artificial, symbolic and supernatural and are used to create tension and intensity. Hochleitner argues that such use of light resonates and connects with Christian symbolism and sights the transfiguration and epiphany as examples, but also shows how they work on a physiological level with the use of light and dark that can be said to come close to creating an aesthetic of the unconscious – and eliciting our most basic visceral responses we all have to it. This is true. So twilight isn’t just a photographer’s friend for aesthetic reasons.
—————————-
[1] Martin Hochleitner, On the iconography of Light in the works of Gregory Crewdson, Stephen Berg (Ed) Gregory Crewdson 1995-2005 by published by Hatje Cantz 2008
anomiepete 