![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.artoronto.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/rm4_storyteller_lrg-JW.jpg\" "\\"rm4_storyteller_lrg")
<\/a>\n1\/ Jeff Wall
\nThe storyteller, 1986
\nTransparency in lightbox
\n229 x 437 cm
\nCourtesy of the artist<\/em><\/p>\n
Looking at Wall\u2019s and Crewdson\u2019s life sized images we recognize immediately that these are not snapshots from the real world. By using the imagery and effects of paintings, movies and literature they create an invented world of make-believe. The two artists have many similarities in the procedure of creating their photographs, such as a long planning period, a complicated staging procedure and a very careful execution of the final image. Jeff Wall described this procedure in his interview Pictures like novels (db-artmag, 2007 May): \u201c\u2026when I work for a week on something, or a month, I do it because things change as I work. I discover things that I wouldn\u2019t have known about the subject, about the place, about the time of day. Things I wouldn\u2019t have known if I\u2019d worked more quickly.\u201d He rebuilds the original scene in his studio and recreates the significant moment that captured his attention, so it almost seems real. Crewdson\u2019s pictures are much more complicated in their imagery and always have a dreamlike, almost supernatural present.<\/p>\n
Both Wall and Crewdson are compared to the movies in the special way in which the photographs are made. They do not hide their staging and just like in the movies they are expensive and require a lot of planning, a big crew and special equipments. Wall\u2019s stages are always realistic, regardless if they were built in his studio (Searching the premises, 2009) or he uses the outsides (Milk 1982, Passerby, 1996). Crewdson\u2019s stages are closer to movie frames in their ambitions of picturing stills of strange stories or dreams. The perfection is so important for both artists that strong control must be applied. The images are planned in every detail and deliberately executed, so the camera only records what the artists want us to see and nothing more. Besides their similarities the two artists are very different in their narratives. Wall\u2019s images are still closely related to the original moment he has witnessed. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to miss out on life\u201d, he said in the same interview,\u201d and so I involve this notion like a cinematographer, and I reconstruct. And the reconstruction is both; it\u2019s as faithful to the event as I can make it. I feel I should be free to do things such as change the place, the season, the time of day.\u201d He rebuilds the original scene in order to recreate the significant moment that captured his attention. He doesn\u2019t add so much to the original scene but makes it really focused around the issue he wants to emphasize. For example in Mimic (1982), a street scene where a white man makes a racist gesture toward an oriental person by slanting his eyes might skip our attention but in Wall\u2019s composition it is becoming a gigantic, painful episode impossible to overlook. He depicts the native people in Story telling (1986) in their effort of saving their heritage (a young woman wearing traditional clothes) and the danger of loosing it (the lonely rootless man under the bridge). He shows great sympathy towards the unemployed in Waiting. Wall\u2019s picture radiates hope, he finds poor people interesting because their struggle deepens their expressions. Wall\u2019s cinematographic photographs come into life only when the light switched on and the dark boxes start to radiate his images. At that magic moment they have a very strong present, representing the electric lights of cities and reminding us for our obsession with the always running television set.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n2\/ Jeff Wall
\nPasserby, 1996
\nSilver gelatin print
\n250 x 339.5 cm
\nCourtesy of the artist<\/em><\/p>\n
\nWall hires amateur actors to represent his characters or people on the street (Waiting, War games) to play themselves. Crewdson went as far as engaging famous actors such us William H. Macy, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman to embody his protagonist (Dream House series, 2002) so their images from films blend with the scenes of domestic loneliness deepening the meaning of images.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n3\/ Gregory Crewdson
\nUntitled (Ophelia) 2001; From Twilight series
\nDigital C-print, 127 x 152.4 cm
\n\u00a9 Gregory Crewdson. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery<\/em><\/p>\n