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N GI'\I GORY CREWDSON

1.

As 110soften been observed, Gregory Crswdson's father was a psychiatrist

with a particular interest in Freudian analysis. This would have been in the

Brooklyn of Crewdson's childhood, Park Slope before it was Park Slope, or

Park Slope fit uie dawn of its present identity, a neighborhood crowded with

por nmbulators and health-food stores, places to buy Tibetan rugs. Crewdson

find his siblings Michael and Natasha lived with their happily married parents

[Ctuolo Cruwdson, tho mother in the story, was and is an instructor in the

Aloxondor lochniqllo). and Crowdson's fother conducted sessions in the

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(//()(-JII/S. tt isn't 0 stretch. whenlookinq at illH10as of womon flooting, unoarth

Iy, above tho scauared uash of a subdivision, women suvmerged in a living

room, \0 imagine Gregory Crswdson listening, on the one hand, 10 the record

ings of the early Patti Smith or the Ramones on tile record player in his room,

and, on the other hand, listening to the overheard interpretation of dreams, as

this interpretation is practiced downstairs in the study of his father, interpreta

tion as practiced in the lives of loveless wives and frustrated husbands of Park

Slope, interpretation brought to bear upon the obsessions and compulsions of

everyday lite, these colliding with, the raw material of the LPs on the JVC

turntable. Crewdson has remarked that he was never interested in documen-

tary photos at all, even in his student days, and it's not hard to imagine that this

indeed is the case, at least considered in this warm first light of day. He camelate to the form, he was well into his college education, so that the debate on

what exactly a photograph was, on whether it was doomed to re-create the

actual or, on the other hand, whether it was open to the extenuations that Cindy

Sherman or Barbara Kruger brought to the medium, this was all settled. It was

settled tor Gregory Crewdson A childhood of overhearing the dreams of his

neighbors had already made the actual magical, made the space of the urban

and suburban into an unearthly and terrifying arena of possibility.Which may be why Crewdson prefers Freud's essay on the uncanny to

The Interpretation of Dreams. Wherein the master remarks that the uncanny is

something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. Thesessions in Crewdson's father's practice ought to have remained private, butpnvacv is always mottled, always imperfect, and there's a way in which the

recondite thing is always observed, always in the process of flowering forth

from its concealed space to become the property of the public. Thus,

Crewdson also had his first romantic escapades on his father's couch. Thecouch of psychoanalysis. While it's invasive to dwell overlong on this image (it

ought to remain hidden), it is useful in the context of his photographs to allow

Gregory to be there for a moment, with, let's say, his first really big crush, try-

ing to figure out what to do with her. What are these various bodily parts that

ho has only dimly glimpsed in the past, and how to do it, how to encounter her

body, ethically, physically, gently, gentlemanly, on thai couch, where dreams

nnd Illoil onigmas ArO anatornized [ust out of onrshor. so tilol cortain oneiric

itlHlfJOR suck, adrnlxod in hrs nnotoscom IlIl(i1ll1l11l11l1Hi (II(:olloGIIOn, such that

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uu Ilkll {liling to the Museum of Modern Art light that haloes the father made some impression these late seventies models of the popular song

11111IIIHIIO Arbus retrospective in 1972, turn on him, likewise the eccentricity of the Brooklyn were much in the minds of Hoffert and Crewdson,

III. UII"IIII1I01.Maybe in the dream register, a~ family, perhaps a fanciful interpretation of the the architects of the band, To such a degree, in fact,

'1IIIIIi IIVUI!tOllld part of psychoanalysis, cultural Crewdson family itself, so that photography, sud- that the producer of the band's second single was

i., wut: fJllrl are like the seeds of morning denly, in this spectatorial setting, is not at all Clem Burke, the drummer for Blondie. There's a

1111- III IHlll10 other all-consuming vine, they about an exact reproduction of the truth, but is pretty good Blondie-esque drum break at the end of

11111\lrl~IVOaspect to them but only if you nick rather a dramatization of something which ought the song, and the riff in the verse sounds a lot like

II III xuuk thorn overnight. What photographs to have remained hidden, The uncanny aspect of Lance Loud's band from the period, the Mumps,

,.,IIIIIIIIIY hnvo seon at the 1972 retrospective? the photograph is fleeting; it seems to render the Leaving aside the design of the sleeve for the single,

1111111 IllIvllillN onus, no doubt, but what if he had Crewdson family, in Illy imagined version, only in which can't help but recall such New Wave video

ii lill! PHiB unru of A YOl/ng Brooklyn Fnmily rhe interval of the flash bulb, because Gl'egory stars as Scandal {featuring Patty Smythe), and

11,/ ,,,' 1I, ....'III/(/IlY Oliling, 1966, What if Crewdson recoqnlzos that his dad, who saw something in which makes Gregory Crewdson look like he's sort

1IIIII,ull IIl1il1(J on fl Sunday outing with his ths young Grogory that would undorstand and of proto-Ran or Night Ranger, what is impOIlOlll in

IklVI! 111111111,tlio psvchonnnlvst, 10 lhe Museum opprociato Diano Albus Ivou don't hoar Crowdson IiUht of the work wo have boto.o us now, in 111oligh(

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1111111111 tumku thu photoqrauhs in the Twilighllit tlVllll1110 photographs of his earlier work,

jilillll!lIlIlpliH lit oil? No, ho probably did not. asItt I !tUlill 111111:11flOI11 reading For Whom the

I 'II wnuu, III twelve, I reael it at the instigation

IIV !II m Irulun It IS the philosophical import of

l-:l tltllt IriSIn 111 such moments, such trips to

111'11111111, wluch are, from the paternal stand-

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V hi 1'llIljl II ton year-ole! entertained for a

NWllttllllloss, these outings have a tremen-

Itlll!llli Kleis oro mainly embarked on the

I Iii Iltl11H1I11J parental advice, Later, as young

11,. !lilly 11111uvon busy appearing to hate their

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3,

Tho Spaodios woro tho rockannroll band in which

Crswdson playod while a taenaqer, Formed whonhe was sixteen, in 1979, the Speedics were qiven to

excesses in the matter of dress, in that they

dressed entirely in the playful and hideous Italian

designers of that moment, checkerboard sweat-

shirts, lots of artificial fabrics, etc, Gregory

Crewdson played rhythm guitar and wrote or co-

wrote many of the band's compositions, While his

guitar playing on the track that I heard by the

Speedies was agile and competent, the lead guitar

player in the band (called Eric Hoffert, who nowsweater seems almost deranged somehow, works as a software developer for Apple) was

standing in front of his old man, Only the father spectacular, and the relationship between the twolooks at the photographer, with a passive but

knowing engagement. Maybe this iconic son res-

onated with the young Crewdson, who couldn't

have been much older himself, so that the unearthly

guitar players was really interesting, sort of in that

way that the relationship between the guitars in the

Voidoids was interesting, Of in Television, the band

featuring Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, Clearly,

efforts on Crawdson's behalf with respect to themedium of his profession and yet perhaps the

relationship between the primitive libidinal energy

of the Punk/New Wave ethos of New York City in

the late seventies and the medium of photography

is implicit in Crewdson's first celebrated artwork.

"Let Me Take Your Foto," therefore, as the lyricssuggest, is about how you get chicks, and that Art school. SUNY Purchase, 1981-85, directly after the rock-and-roll experience of the Speedies. I taught

4,

II

seemed to be part of Crewdson's ambition in the there myself, about a decade after Crewdson was there, and itwas one of the happiest teaching experiences

late seventies, the whole rock thing, playing Max's I ever had. A student appeared in my writing workshop class and said, Hey, want to see my new bel/y-Kansas City and the Mudd Club, and opening forthe button piercing? After which she pulled up her shirt to display the raw, red wound for a\1to see. There was

Jam and the Undertones, among other co!lections much dyed hair and many plaid flannels in evidence (this was 1992), and the dorms, where \ had a pizzaof teenagers turning up their guitars (the social with my class, were cinderblock, industrial. It was said, at SUNY Purchase, that the campus was

Undertones, of course, wrote the really splendid designed just after the high period of student oc cupations to be impervious to student riots. There was, it

"Teenage Kicks"), driving from town to town in was said, a sniper tower at SUNY Purchase, right in the center of the campus (on top of the library), from

vans. Apparently, the rigors of touring proved the which position the authorities could threaten, by means of architecture, to take down protestors, if the

undoing of the Speedies, who wanted to be pure student movement did not yield to the power of the institution. Doesn't matter if any of this is true or not, it

pop, who wanted to be as popular as a breakfast only matters if the student body of SUNY Purchase believed it to be true, if the commingling of political lore

cereal, so much so that they actually wrote a song and arts education created such fertile imaginings. A sniper tower was something that ought to havecalled "We Want to Be Your Breakfast Cereal." The remained hidden, as with the contempt implicit in relations between the generations, in relations between

Speedies were what you do when you are sixteen, students and faculty. Meanwhile, while I was there, there was a tremendous heroin problem among the

they are how you express yourself when you are students, or so I was told. It was that kind of place, part of the suburban ideal, and yet overwhelmed with

sixteen, when it seems possible to deliver pleasure an urban disorder, and I'm speaking mainly of the students, of course, of their habits and attitudes. It

and meaning in three minutes and forty-five seconds. happens that Hal Hartley, of the excellent Trust and Surviving Desire and other films, was also on the

When you are older, of course, complexity forbids campus, at film school, at about the same time as Gregory Crewdson. In this light, perhaps, we can see

such things. That's why the drummer of the some resemblance between these two artists, since Hartley, at his best, in Trust, is also involved with the

Speedies is now a lawyer, and the singer works for resection of the suburban ideal, where dream strategies, like condensation and displacement, the action

the phone company. When you are an adult, taking of metaphor, undergird the here and now. In Trust, as in the earlier Crewdson images-especially the

someone's fota is no longer libidinous in the same Natural Wonder images-the contours of suburbia are rent by the foregrounding of pollution, decay, etc.

way. And that's why the twilight photographs we Trusttakes place in a Long Island that is full of grenades, explosions, and so forth.

have before us both seem to be easy to interpret Yet if Crewdson's art school experiences seem to be the catalytic agent in his transformation from

and very difficult atthe same time. If you could figure rhythm guitarist to demonic artificer, I would like to propose a far more subliminal topography as the leaping

a photograph out in three minutes and forty-five off point for his photographs, especially in the work of hover (sic), Crewdson's black-and-white cherry-

seconds, you wouldn't want to look at it anymore. picker photos from 1996-97. That is: the natural landscape of western Massachusetts. When Crewdson

1""",111"1111011111101purchased, with a group at investors, a large tract at an almost minimalist love tor its repetitions and simplicities, the imposition at

11111","1111"1of • series at ponds in western Massachusetts, not tar law on the chaotic (there are lots at tiretrucks and police cars in Crewdson's

III' I"WII III 1110(jusl ott the Mass Pike), and carved the parcel up into hover images), and the instant at narrative, in which the dog officer contronts

1", " 111111lillian or so friends, communally, At the farthest end of the the bear, Neighbors Iwho are like us, the spectators, gazing at the photo of this

IIV I" II )l1,"lIno spot, Crewdson's father built for his own family a log moment) onlook from a safe dlstance.It perfectly articulates Crewdson's spot in

I II", .IIIY 1I11l1l1of New England colonial life, and this spot served as a the philosophical debates over the nature of photography, being evenly divided

, 111111liN Hllclus;on into wilderness for the photographer from that day between the bucolic and the artificial.,,111.1IIwll"on now shares the house with his siblings), The landscape of A related question lingers for me: how did he find this particular location?

\Til" Mno.llchusetts with its vinyl siding and subdivisions, right beside the There are only two possibilities, really, Either he set out driving in his car, which

I~.IIIIII' 11,,11Ihe old colonial villages, makes the cherry-picker shots of should properly have been a pickup truck with a hundred thousand miles on it

,II 11I1.. 11111lond also serves as a corrective on the artificial spaces at the and a busted tape player on the tront seat, from which unspooled a wobbly

I """" III Illo Natural Wonder series, anthology of punk rock classics from the early eighties including "That's When

11111Itover series was about ambient light And tor me the most I Reach for My Revolver" by Mission of Burma, in which vehicle Crewdson

1"llltllllllllt: 01 Ihese photos is an untitled picture centrally concerned with a headed up into the hills, winding in and around the Appalachian Trail, or, and this

'trW'" IIlIlny Crewdson photos are often anxious about malevolent wildlife is the other possibility, he just knew where these plac'es were, as he knows that

1111111111"lion photo of the Twilight series, the dead fox from Natural Wonder, Nathaniel Hawthorne once lived not far from here and looked at many at these

01' ) "'IlW of ranch houses, presumably from the housing boom of the early same highlands, as he knows that Melville visited Hawthorne here, where they

1.11110,I" "otagainst a distant horizon of uninterrupted New England mountains, might very well have climbed Monument Mountain, the peak most visible tram

11,,"1111l some cars, perfectly parallel in driveways, A bicycle on a lawn, an Crewdson's domain, known for its resonant Indian lore, wheretrom lovers of

11111.IIIIIlp, Then in the middle of the empty road there's a standoff, A station two warring tribes jumped to their doom after a union was opposed, after which

"'''II"Il, door open, marked "dog officer" on its side, The driver at this car the tribes flung down things from the mountain top in order to memorialize the

IlIlIIllIIlYlllically representative of the authorities}, in the street, is paused in the doomed lovers; either it's a true story, or it's a story I'm simulating, in order to

IIIIIIIIIIl of some trash from an overturned garbage can, in the midst at which, in all get from the Melville who said of Hawthorne "I know what his secret is," to the

II' IIIIl".C., is a bear. The dog officer, tor his part, holds in one hand a gun, in the Gregory Crewdson who knew in his intuitive method exactly where the bear

111111)(,0 piece of Wonderbread, a trail of which stretches toward the wayward picture would take place, in some chamber of the narrative of that place, in the

IIIIIISt. So much here is typical of Crewdscn's divided history as an artist, a tear conjunction at the urban and the rural, the bucolic and the artificial, in the

)(11110rural as well as a furious affection tor its rawness, a hatred at culture but admixture of arc lamps and ambient light, in light both particle and wave,

9

105,

Apollo yanks his chariot across the skies, has done so since there was sky in

which to journey, since the Titans designated him for this assignment, and thus

he shall do until the ozone-free skies are a uniform gray and are lit only by

fluorescences and neons. Apollo, god of oracular prophecy and divinations. In

the first morning light we are, unless agriculturalists, asleep, or we have

waked especially for this experience, for that light which is neither entirely one

thing nor another, neither nighttime nor daytime, which brings the promise of

dawn with it It has its symbolic resonances, but they are not the subject of

the recent work of Gregory Crewdson, not quite. Photons can collide withelectrons and other subatornics. dusk comes in waves, like the tides, dusk is

the separation of all into spectral wavelengths, it is nature at its most artificial,

ambient light at its most perfect, such that film directors have always favored

it with their attentions, waited for it, waited for the magic hour, but also because

the poetry of retrospection always adheres to dusk, to the gloaming, to the time

when night becomes a thing to be survived, so that a woman floating over a

lawn covered with trash-that is, all the stuff we are trying to reject (One feels

the purifying change. One rejects/ The trash, as Wallace Stevens had it, That's

the moment when the moon creeps up/ To the bubbling of bassoons.)-feels

lyrical, even poeticized, Or a cluster of pheasant and other game birds around

mounds of bread seems natural, like the proper eruption of the dream world in

this world, like the overheard analysis of dreams, drifting u·p through the

floorboards, a boy levitating a strange rash from the declivity of his sister's

stomach, while coyote watch through an open door, a woman kneeling in an

indoor garden with zinnias and daisies all around her, it means something, it's aphilosopher's honeymoon, yet I leave it all to analysts of dreams to describe the

precise topology of these images. What is twilight? What is it being captured

here in general? The word first made appearance linguistically in twilighting, in

Middle English, shortened soon thereafter in, e.g., 1440, Be-twyx the day and

the night, similarly, tweefight, in the Dutch of the 16th century; by 1600, Hooker

in his sermon on Jude, remarks, He must haue darknes for a vision, he must

stumble at noon daies, as at the twi-light, and Boyle, in Style of Scripture:

Faith and twilight seeming to agree in this property, that mixture of darkness

is requisite in both, and you can observe for yourself that Boyle is saying nothing

here of how a mixture of lightness is requisite, twilight at evening is noteworthy

for its promise of all dark things, thus, Byron, a couple hundred years later,

At my hour of twilight, little light of life remains, by extension, twilight, an

intermediate condition or period, giving us such related phenomena as the

twilight arch, "the shadow of the earth on the atmosphere seen rising in the

eastern sky during evening twilight," likewise the famous twilight zone, which I

didn't know until now actually refers to the lowest part of the photic region of the

II. III IIUI twilight band which is a particular sweet spot in the courses of

thl! IWIII{jht effect an error in radio bearings, twilight sleep, induced by

IIll1tHI IIIHI used in childbirth, twilight state, "a dreamy state lacking touch with

Hili 111!llily,occurring in epilepsy, hysteria, and schizophrenia, and sometimes

IlIIuli wllh narcotics." Perhaps here you have th"esystem of concerns reflected

thn IWlh{jhl of Gregory Crewdson, dreams, phantasms, subaquatic regions,

l"vl.11I1I shows, Rod Serlinq. schizophrenia, morphine, the poetry of Wallace

h'VUIIIf, uven a test where I learned about light from reading in the general

11111111111111of physics: A volunteer is taken from the audience around to the back

" /h" III/)Ie by an assistant who helps the volunteer kneel or sit with the head

I'HI/lwllng through the hole In the table while the demonstrator, who at this

1111/111 umutetes a magician, holds the tablecloth in such a way as to conceal

IUIIII Ihe audience what is happening to the volunteer. A tittle patter about the

IIIlIlwiries and differences between science and magic fits in well here. A few

1/IIIIIts and groans from behind the cloth add to the drama. Finally, when the

volunteer is in place, the cloth is removed, and the audience is presented with

/III} illusion that a disembodied head is resting on the table. Everywhere the

lI\lht of twilight, in which the opposites repel one another anew, in which

civilizations embrace their obverses, in which paradoxes dance wildly, twilight.

.luhuu C. Sprott, Plrysir;s Oemollsrratiolls; A Socroebooc for Toachers of Plrvsics (1996)

11