The Gregory Crewdson film is coming!

[David R Munson]

http://www.gregorycrewdsonmovie.com/

The Gregory Crewdson film is coming out and I am really, really, reeeeeeally excited about it. Looks like it'll be very interesting.

[frotog]

Oh no! The PT Barnum of high-art photography resurfaces in a sycophantic film. It ought to be good for a couple of laughs between the gags. What a poseur. Why not look at the source material work he dumbed down? Check out Jeff Wall or Justine Kurland. Lord knows Greg did.

[Doug Howk]

He was in the Genius of Photography 3rd DVD on the future trends of photography. Should be interesting.

[vinny]

He should learn how to light before blowing it on 8x10 film.
Sorry. What I meant to say what that everyone makes a big deal out of his "giant" productions and lighting setups but it's nothing that isn't done on a low budget movie set every day in the motion picture world. I just don't see what makes the results (some of his concepts are pretty cool) so amazing and worthy of praise.

[David R Munson]

Well, some of us find his work fascinating and consider it to be very, very good. I've never understood why so many people are so violently against the man. If guys think he's such a hack, where's your comparable work? If you're not interested, why not just keep the hell out of it?

[Andrew O'Neill]

Some of his stuff is shite and some of it is pretty cool. I wouldn't consider him a hack, though. He's as good as Jeff Wall. Maybe even influenced by him. Good on him for doing what he loves to do.

[K. Praslowicz]

Well, some of us find his work fascinating and consider it to be very, very good. I've never understood why so many people are so violently against the man. If guys think he's such a hack, where's your comparable work? If you're not interested, why not just keep the hell out of it?

I soundly believe that if scientists and mathematicians where to thoroughly study photographer-on-photographer distaste and figure out a mathematical formula for it, the two most heavily weighted variables would be the amount of money a photographer sells prints for, and how much money they spend to create their photography. Those who just shoot 8x10 and sell for a lot seem to get it pretty bad. Crewdson on the other hand with his huge sets and crews definitely has to be pumping up the money spent part of the equation when evaluated against him.

I, however, and very interested in seeing this. Constructing photographs on this scale is something I don't ever see my self doing, but am very intrigued at the amount of work he puts into his photography. So what if he wants to go through the intense set-ups he does to make the images he wants to make? I just see him taking a perfectly acceptable film director's approach to still image making. Its like railing on Robert Zemeckis for making Forrest Gump because he had a script and actors instead of just jumping out into Alabama with a shoulder sized camera to do a documentary on a random man of low intelligence.

[frotog]

Well, some of us find his work fascinating and consider it to be very, very good. I've never understood why so many people are so violently against the man. If guys think he's such a hack, where's your comparable work? If you're not interested, why not just keep the hell out of it?

You did post this in the "on photography" section of this forum, didn't you? Are you suggesting that in order to have an opinion on a photographer's work one needs compare that person's work to one's own? A rather myopic way of approaching a critique don't you think, le contrarian?

Beyond my opinion that the pictures themselves are ham-fisted and simple, historically what's interesting about Crewdson's staged narrative work is how symptomatic it was of that decade's increasingly corporate art-world (especially that sector of what the complicit critics called, and I hate this phrase, "lens-based art") - overly concerned with production for production's sake, materialistic in conceit and dumbed-down for mass consumption. And this critique has nothing to do with pretend mathematical formulae.

Again, this is just my opinion and it obviously does not represent the opinions of everyone reading this forum but that fact hardly justifies your opinion that I "just keep the hell out of it". Clearly his audience is drawn to these pictures because of the power of the cinematic language he's using and how pervasive it is in the culture at large.

But what can I say? Sales prove that more people prefer listening to Mannheim Steamroller than to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion - so to each his own, le contrarian.

[Bill_1856]

I don't think that he shows much originality in his subject matter, (mundane is the name of the thing), but he certainly is an excellent studio photographer, fully on the level of Halsman (Dali Atomicus).

[cosmicexplosion]

i think his works are deceptively original, sure every thing influences everything else, but there is often a calm and spaciousness in his work that allows ones own imagination to wander.

to me as an artist, there is nothing worse than an obvious statement. for it is over before it begins.

nothing is moved in dark heavy thin and small recesses of the human mind, that has significance enough to break the somnambulistic trance.

i remember as a child being frustrated out of my skull at the stupid images i was given on curtains in my room.

i had to look at these things all day every day! duck rainbow dog, red yellow blue.

i would prefer some abstract art.

if i could not work it out, then at least i would have some thing to work out in my hazy day dreaming, when nothing else was in my head.

we underestimate the youth, and the subconscious.

so i could live with many of his prints even though they are 'boring', simply because they are not 'david la chapell exiting'.











ANdrew