Tableau photography......intentional artificiality.

Today's lecture centered around the art of narrative photography or the use of storytelling in contemporary art photography. This area of photographic practise is known as tableau photography and is covered in Chapter 2 of Charlotte Cotton's "the photograph as contemporary art" published in 2004.

In Chapter 2 "Once Upon a Time" she takes us through the various tableau practitioners which include such luminaries as Jeff Wall, Tom Hunter and Sam Taylor-Ward. As Cotton points out the meaning of this sort of photography "is reliant on our investing the image with our owns trains of narrative and psychological thought". In other words the photographer will lay before the viewer their creation, their narrative, but a lot of the interpretation that then follows is dependant on the imagination of the person viewing the photograph.

Before starting my degree at SSU, I remember watching a BBC4 documentary called "The Genius of Photography" and a section of one programme covered an American photographer called Gregory Crewdson (b 1962).

I watched fascinated as Crewdson went through an incredibly elaborate, costly direction process whereby he stage managed a fake scenario including actors so just one photograph could be taken (seen below).

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

I was amazed that he thought it worth spending so much time just to get one photograph and one that was so unnatural or contrived. I appreciated that his work sold for vast sums but could not truly grasp the concept that the contemporary art photographer very much likes to create a scene rather like the artists who painted pictures before the arrival of film. Everyone starts with a blank canvas and what goes down on that canvas can be artistically created, even by photographers. Crewdson's technique is fully explained by him in the video clip below but he admits that he likes to portray an "eerie stillness" in his photography and it would be impossible to depict this "stillness" in anything but a "still" negative. He also likes to present the "ordinary and yet the strange" and again this mix is part of the narrative process and can be conceived directly from Crewdson's imagination and then physically constructed rather than a search for the right location with real people.

The critic Stephan Berg said this of Crewdson - "his photography revolves around a simple theme: the intrusion of the suppressed, eerie and inexplicable into the seemingly idyllic normal world. With an almost obsessive energy he works on creating an imaginary world whose carefully painted idyll, rich in detail, is permanently and irreversibly subverted....it might seem surprising that he sees himself as 'an American realist landscape photographer' placing himself in the tradition of great chroniclers of everyday life in America from Walker Evans via Gary Winogrand to William Eggleston. But this self-description isn't as teasing and far-fetched as it seems".