Freud and Crewdson

It is emphasised that Gregory Crewdson’s father, and to be more precise his profession, has had a strong impact on Gregory Crewdson’s photographs.

His father was a psychoanalyst. He used to meet with his patients in the basement of their family home in Brooklyn. The future photographer would press his ear to the wooden floor and try to listen to his father’s therapy sessions.

Even though he says now he couldn’t really hear anything, it has still influenced him. He was projecting images in his mind into the patients’ histories. Gregory Crewdson calls it his “first photographic act”. He mentions as well that his father is “the most central person” in his work.

These influences are both visible in his earlier surreal images of birds inhabiting the rear gardens or farms with their own rituals as in the later cinematic works.

 

The motif of people driven by their fears and obsessions, or sometimes caught in the middle of some nightmare comes back in all of the cinematic images from Twilight and Beneath the Roses series.

 

Twilight series 1999