GREGORY CREWDSON:
Crewdson is an American photographer who’s images show a ‘dreamlike’ quality. He uses a large production team to help him create his shots; almost like they would be shooting a film. The team takes over a town for a few weeks, adding in different things (such as rain machines) to create the perfect scene for a photo. He quotes that “My pictures are that search for a moment, that perfect moment……[they are] this blurring of reality and fiction”. They are elaborately staged scenes, mostly of American homes, creating ‘eery’, ‘surreal’, horror scenes.
BILL HENSON:
Henson takes pictures of people in small, dark intimate spaces. His images show a feeling of sensuality, using only half of the scene to show the picture. His prints are made huge and are incredibly low lit, most of the time showing pure darkness and then the face of a person appearing in the middle of the image. They are usually quite controversial and stereotypically show the theme of ‘fear’ throughout (unlike Crewdson’s work which is more ‘unreal’ rather than ‘scary’ and ‘fearful’.
GLEN LUCHFORD:
Luchford is a British fashion photographer which (like Gregory Crewdson) makes his images very ‘cinematic’ and uses elaborate lighting set ups to create the final image. He creates a very ‘film noir’ style of work, showing themes of robbers, gangsters, femme fatal, seduction, etc.
RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD:
Meatyard used a lot of masks in his images, ‘covering up’ and ‘hiding’ peoples personality. He uses a slow shutter speed to add effect and is very secretive about his work, being careful not to reveal anything. Whenever he was asked about his work he replied with “What do you see in it?” instead of answering the question.
RUT BLEES LUXE,BURG:
A German photographer focused on taking night photos of London. She showed not the beautiful tourist side of it, but the dangerous, night time, dirty, gritty night scenes. This showed another side of the city, it is the opposite of what we are used to seeing, and definitely wouldn’t want to be seen by tourists in this way. Her photos scream ‘DANGER’ at you as they have a very strange, dark, almost horrible feel to them. She uses very long exposures in order to capture the lighting around her (such as street lamps) to create her work.
GOYA:
Goya was a Spanish painter (late 1700’s-early 1800’s) which painted images of his own interpretation of hell and ‘demons’. He showed a lot of inhuman acts and death in his work, making it quite gory and controversial. He also showed a lot of propaganda against France in his work as he was alive during the Peninsular War.
JAKE & DINOS CHAPMAN:
The Chapman brothers started their career by looking at Goya’s work for inspiration. They then recreated scenes of his work but used little plastic models or mannequins to do this. They took very gruesome and disturbing images which caused them a lot of trouble and became extremely controversial. They made a series called ‘fucking hell’ which was a recreation (sort of..) of the Saatchi creation series called ‘hell’. The brothers’ work was very sexualised and ‘inappropriate’, and making fun of a lot of things/people which was mostly Nazi inflicted.
I think my favourite artist out of these ones is Gregory Crewdson.
louise huber 