Gregory Crewdson

The photograph seems utterly serendipitous: a boy stands under a bridge, framed by lush trees, and directs his (and the viewer's) gaze heavenward through backlit fog toward some unseen attraction.

But nothing has been left to chance. The photographer, Gregory Crewdson, scouted the spot under a Massachusetts railroad bridge for a month, and a crew of about 40 people spent days setting up the shot. The illumination comes from lights suspended from cranes, and the fog rises from hidden machines. Crewdson instructed the boy, who had been hanging around the bridge, to imagine "a dream world where everything is perfect."

Such preparation for a single photographic image may seem a bit much, but this was a relatively simple Crewdson shoot. For some of the photographs collected in his new book, Beneath the Roses, he shut down public streets, used rainmaking machines to produce downpours—even simulated a raging house fire. He uses such Hollywood-scale production techniques to create what he calls "in-between moments"—interludes just before or after unspecified but obviously momentous events. His pictures set the stage for a story, but the viewer has to flesh it out.

"When I'm making my pictures, I never really think about what happens before or what happens after," says Crewdson, 45. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s, he was intrigued by his father's work as a psychoanalyst. "The fact that his office was in our house always suggested some sense of the furtive or the secret," he says. Dyslexia eventually drew Crewdson to photography. "I have a very difficult time thinking linearly," he says. "I tend to think more in terms of images."

While at the Yale University School of Art, where he earned an MFA in 1988, Crewdson spent lots of time taking pictures in western Massachusetts, where his family had a cabin. Since then, he has used that landscape as a giant photo studio, seeking locations that he says evoke the "familiar and unfamiliar."

The resulting pictures, typically stitched together from negatives scanned into a computer, "look like paintings, but they give you an emotional feeling stronger than a lot of movies you'd walk away from," says Rick Sands, Crewdson's director of photography, who has also worked on films. "If you read a screenplay, it is telling you where to go....You take yourself places in one of his pictures."

The photographs in the book were taken over seven years at a cost of "less than you think it would," says Crewdson. He and his wife, Ivy, an art consultant, live in Greenwich Village with their children, Lily, 3, and Walker, 1. He often gets his ideas while swimming (he tries to get in some laps every day), but it takes months to produce a finished image. For outdoor scenes, he'll drive around to find sites; interiors are built on a soundstage at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. Crew members say he knows what he wants but is open to possibilities. "He'll tell me he wants women that look haunted or somebody who looks like they've lived a hard life," says casting director Juliane Hiam.

Crewdson teaches photography at Yale, but making pictures is his "main job"; a Crewdson print can sell for up to $150,000. He insists it's not about money. "It's just about trying to find something elusive and beautiful and mysterious in the world," he says.

David McMillan

Winnipeg photographer David McMillan has visited the Chernobyl evacuation zone six times since 1994, recording the solitary decay of this modern Pompeii in a series of images that now form part of the permanent collection of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa.

In the 19th century, the art theorist John Ruskin described the aesthetic category of the "picturesque." Picturesque art typically dwelled on charming rustic scenes that had the attributes of age, ruggedness and decline. Ruskin considered the picturesque a suspect genre, for it indulged a "delight in ruin" that allowed the viewer to suspend any concern for the human implications of a scene. McMillan's photographs call to mind Ruskin's critique of the picturesque in that, despite the tragic ruin they record, their most noticeable attribute is beauty. Many are interiors: paint peels in enormous flakes from walls, and despite the terrifying meaning of this decay, the eye luxuriates in the softly saturated turquoises and greens with which these rooms were once so optimistically decorated. Some are infused with a pearly light pouring in sideways from windows; others, facing a window head-on, are flooded with a glare that obliterates everything beyond — an overexposure that is more metaphorical than technical.

Of course, this work shares more with documentary photography than with Victorian notions of beauty. Found objects provide ample scope for political critique: one image records an incomplete arrangement of flags on a wall, vestiges of a dismantled Soviet Union; in another, a shattered portrait of Lenin stands among the debris of a nursery school. The political hubris is clear. Not to mention the sheer environmental madness of it all: perhaps the most telling photograph shows the burying of heavy military equipment that became contaminated during the clean-up process.

But this is documentary that, indulging in some degree of manipulation, ventures into narrative symbolism. The door of a car on a road that goes nowhere is left ajar, which might accord with our notion of the panic of evacuation, until we learn that Pripyat, the former town of 45 000 where many of these photographs were taken, was not evacuated until 36 hours after the disaster. Other things we must believe even if we cannot comprehend them: grasses and ferns growing through the floor of a hotel room, or the branch of a tree penetrating a pane of glass. Plants thrusting up through asphalt, shrubs with tiny white blooms: these are also miraculous, given the fact that a 400-hectare pine forest near the reactor died within days of the accident, the trees, their needles bright red, were buried in a concrete-lined pit.

Pripyat was built to house the workers at the power plant. In these depopulated photographs, their lives are not represented so much as implied: rusting cots lined up against a nursery wall; shelves of little potties; school records abandoned, depriving children of part of their brief history. Suspended in time, every detail enters the realm of the symbolic as a token of loss. Even nature, with its mutated regenerations, has entered the symbolic realm at Chernobyl, for it is no longer, and never will be, as it once was. A tree that grows in a radioactive schoolyard is no longer a tree, but merely the idea of one.

home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~dmcmill/

Boogie

Born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia, Boogie began documenting rebellion and unrest during the civil war that ravaged his country during the 1990s. He moved to New York in 1998.

artcoup.com

Zach Gold

Zach Gold has been working in the fashion and advertising photography world since he was selected in 1997 as one of the top 100 artists under 35 in New York City. In 2000, the late Peter Jennings presented Gold with the International Center of Photography’s Young Photographer of the Year award, calling him “one of the leaders in creative image making.” Other award recipients that evening included world-renowned photographers Robert Frank and the late Helmut Newton. The following year, Gold’s work was exhibited during New York’s annual fashion shows at Bryant Park, where he was named “one of the 10 photographers changing fashion photography”.

In addition to his influential fashion and advertising photography, Gold was one of the first artists in the world to successfully blend the subtle complexities of both camera and computer to produce photorealistic digital art. Articles about his groundbreaking digital illustrations have been featured in French Photo, Rojo, Photo District News, Creativity, AdWeek, Bild (Sweden), Profifoto (Germany). In 2000, he was the youngest artist to be included in Graphis.

Gold has exhibited and delivered lectures throughout the United States, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Italy. His distinguished style and innovative approaches to photography have attracted some of the biggest names in the creative industries, including David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Willem Dafoe. Last year Gold was personally asked by 50 Cent to shoot the cover of his latest album. Some of his advertising and editorial clients include Nike, Mini Cooper, Sony PlayStation, Warner Brothers, and MTV.

Gold graduated with honors from Parsons School of Design in 1995.

www.zachgold.com/

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American author, filmmaker, philosopher, literary theorist, and political activist.

In her Essay On Photography Sontag says that the evolution of modern technology has changed the viewer in three key ways. She calls this the emergence of a new visual code. Firstly, Sontag suggests that modern photography, with its convenience and ease, has created an overabundance of visual material. As photographing is now a practice of the masses, due to a drastic decrease in camera size and increase of ease in developing photographs, we are left in a position where “just about everything has been photographed”(Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 3). We now have so many images available to us of: things, places, events and people from all over the world, and of not immediate relevance to our own existence, that our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view or should view has been drastically affected. Arguably, gone are the days that we felt entitled of view only those things in our immediate presence or that affected our micro world; we now seem to feel entitled to gain access to any existing images. “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe” (Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 3) This is what Sontag calls a change in “viewing ethics” (Susan Sontag (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 3'').

Secondly, Sontag comments on the effect of modern photography on our education, claiming that photographs “now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present”( Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 4). Without photography only those few people who had been there would know what the Egyptian pyramids or the Parthenon look like, yet most of us have a good idea of the appearance of these places. Photography teaches us about those parts of the world that are beyond our touch in ways that literature can not.

Sontag also talks about the way in which photography desensitizes its audience. Sontag introduces this discussion by telling her own story of the first time she saw images of horrific human experience. At twelve years old, Sontag stumbled upon images of holocaust camps and was so distressed by them she says “When I looked at those photographs something broke... something went dead, something is still crying” (Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 20). Sontag argues that there was no good to come from her seeing these images as a young girl, before she fully understood what the holocaust was. For Sontag the viewing of these images has left her a degree more numb to any following horrific image she viewed, as she had been desensitized. According to this argument, “Images anesthetize” and the open accessibility to them is a negative result of photography (Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 20).

Sontag examines the relationship between photography and reality. Photographs are depicted as a representation of realism. Sontag claimed that “such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image, an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real (Sontag, Susan 1982 The Image World p. 350). It is a resemblance of the real as the photograph becomes an extension of the subject. However, the role of the photograph has changed, as copies destroy the idea of an experience. The image has altered to convey information and become an act of classification. Sontag highlights the notion that photographs are a way of imprisoning reality- making the memory stand still. Ultimately images are surveillance of events that trigger the memory. In modern society, photographs are a form of recycling the real. When a moment is captured it is assigned a new meaning as people interpret the image in their own manner. Sontag depicts the idea that images desensitize the real thing, as people's perceptions are distorted by the construction of the photograph. However this has not stopped people from consuming images; there is still a demand for more photographs. Therefore, Sontag has impacted the audience's understanding of reality, as photographs have adapted to a form of surveillance.

Susan Sontag brought out some uses of the photography, “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation” (Sontag,1977. P10), such as memorizing and providing evidence. She also states that “to collect photography is to collect the world.” (Sontag,1997.p3)

Sontag believes that photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. She states that photography has ‘become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation’.^[3] She refers to photographs as memento mori, where to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability and mutability. The progression from the written word to capturing an image shifts the weight of the interpretation from the author to the receiver. Sontag believes however that ‘photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire’.^[4] It is a slice in time and in effect, is more memorable than moving images for example, videos. It fills the gaps in our mind of the past and present.^[5] Even though photography has such effect, there are limits to photographic knowledge of the world. The limitations are that it can never be interpreted ethical or political knowledge.^[6] It will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. Our modern day society can be described as a society feeding on aesthetic consumerism. There is an addiction and a need to constantly have reality confirmed and experiences enhanced by photographs.^[7]

http://www.susansontag.com/