The Surrealist work of Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who has earned a place of honor among the greats of recent photography history. I have to admit that his photographic style is my weakness and maybe that makes me a little less objective than usual, but we can not deny the impressive quality of his works.

This great professional, is famous for his surrealistic photographs of the suburbs of the United States . Fictional scenes that he painstakingly designs - with great detail - to visually construct the sensation that is in his head, what he calls frozen moments , usually disturbing and reminiscent of classic horror films, thanks to a deeply cinematic aesthetic .

In Crewdson's own words, he says he has always been fascinated by the poetic condition of the twilight and its power to turn the ordinary into something magical and supernatural , something that is evident in each and every one of his photographs, characterized by those cold lights so typical of dusk combined with the artificial light of vehicles, lampposts, dwellings ... and adding all kinds of elements recreated like fog or rain.

I do not know if we can call him a photographer or it would be more accurate to call him a cinematographer , since he works on a scale that many people are not surprised to see and act in a way more like a film director and not have to worry about the camera or any other particular detail but simply "just" that everything is exactly as he imagined it, helped by his collaborators. In fact, he usually does not even shoot the photo, but usually another photographer, like Daniel Karp .

A large format camera, lighting like the one we would use in a Hollywood blockbuster , a very complete team of professionals that  filmmakers would like in their shoots, models or rather static actors, a lot of previous preparation and especially hours and hours of work in every detail of the scene. An entire production exercise with almost unlimited resources and an impressive display of media for a single photograph, which may seem crazy, but this how he works to make the most of those resources and translate them into the perfection of his final photographs.

Some people will not even be paying attention to it, because on Flickr we usually find a lot of work like this, but ... where is the difference? Well, mainly that Crewdson gets all the "touches" that he wants in a single shot - that for something hires a team more of the world of the cinema and shoots in plates - and not in Photoshop as many os us do in the present time.

If I tell you the truth, despite of course an impeccable technique - I just would not want it to be that way with the media it uses - what impresses me the most about Gregory Crewdson is not the technical aspect of his images, of course, I wonder, or the budgets that he'll manage that will be of order, but the tremendous meaning and the powerful feelings that express their works. I think he can almost condense a whole story into just one of those frozen moments and blow our imagination. 

All my image sources are from Google and Pinterest. 

If you liked this post please show us your support with an upvote and resteem, and if you would like to share your opinion with us don't forget to leave a comment. Thanks for reading!