Trifonova, Temenuga; (2013) Staging Time: On Gregory Crewdson's Photography Fellow Lecture. Presented at: Fellows Monthly Salon, Ménerbes, France.

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Abstract

In contemporary culture the rate at which images are produced, distributed and archived far exceeds the rate at which they can be grasped or interpreted. The digital’s uncontrolled emergence into the frame, the ease with which each frame can now be filled with inexhaustible—irrelevant—detail, has paradoxically recreated the condition in which cinema found itself at its inception. Whereas early films filled the frame with a variety of competing characters, actors and objects, testing the viewer’s ability to discern that most significant action, in classical cinema everything within the frame was composed to orient the viewer’s attention to the most narratively significant action or object. The more casual and easily accessible the digital becomes, the more necessary it is for the artist to give some sort of assurance of intentionality and artistry by carefully composing the shot. The “instant-everywhere of the digital” has, perhaps, prompted cinematic photographers, like Gregory Crewdson, to revive classical cinema’s attention to mise-en-scene, to “composing the shot,” as a resistance to the disposability, casualness, and availability of images in contemporary culture. As David Campany notes, “Popular image culture has accelerated and become largely electronic so that photography now is grasped as a medium characterized by slowness. Where once it might have been the pinnacle of cultural speed, it now seems a more deeply contemplative medium, detached even while it describes” (20). Gretchen Garner emphasizes the paradigm shift that has taken place: “Whereas the earliest modernist photographers collaborated with the world and waited for special moments to photograph, the new manipulators don’t depend on the weather or light (or even the presence of their subjects) to make their images” (246). This shift toward a more controlled, imagination-based—rather than reality-based—medium points to a growing skepticism that the camera can reveal, by itself, some kind of deeper truth, or that events unfolding by themselves are self-evident or self-explanatory. Artists no longer believe in the medium as a witness: it is the photographer who must now act as witness by staging reality and thus commenting on it.

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