Possible photographers/artists that may be useful?

At this point in the exam, I don't really know what I want to do. However, while filing through a few photographers within the exam paper, I came across Gregory Crewdsons work.

At first glance they appear very dark and mysterious until you actually begin to look further into them.

Gregory Crewdson seeks out the tensions between the familiar and the strange within his elaborately scened compositions.

Even though he is classed as a photographer, to me he is much more than that, he doesn't just pull out a camera from his bag and begins shooting at anything that looks interesting or that could create an interest from the public, he is an artist. He has a completely different take on photographs, he produces the scenery on set, a scened photograph. He creates the emotions of which people feel towards his photographs as well as the tension and questions that appear inside our heads when looking at them. He is an artist.

It often takes him around five weeks to create one photograph. While on location he seeks for inspiration of what could inspire him to create a masterpiece.

Below are some of his creations:

I love the way he can bring an emotion or that sense of tension within someone when they look at his work, the way he can create a question in your mind, long before you would have even thought of it, take the photo above, the questions that may appear within my mind are; where is she? is she dead? alive? is she lying on the floor, in water or is she floating in mid air? whats happened to her? these are just some of the questions in which challenge you to want to know more, the thing that makes you study the picture for more answers, but will you find them?

That feeling of whether this scene is real or unreal, the sense of finding the truth is thilling to me.

I found that Gregory Crewdson's work links well to the work of Edward hopper and how he also creates tension and that sense of mystery within his paintings.

When a human is in solitude, it tends to be a woman, either dressed, semi-dressed or nude, often reading a book, looking out of a window or in the workplace. This is because Edward Hopper wanted to portray this sense of lonliness and he thought that women were better to show emotion within a painting rather than a man. I love the way he took time to place each person/human being in keeping with the composition of the environment around them. The way he has used light and shadow effectively within the surroundings to create mood and tension, making you want to know more about the painting and the story behind it, it is genius and works well in keeping in tone with the figures within it.

Here are a few examples:

Like the photographs of Gregory Crewdson, Edward hopper also plants question within your mind which makes us search for futher clues within the paintings as to what's happened or how the story in the painting has come to this captured scene. This painting questions whether the couple have had a fight, with the woman's shoulder to the man, keeping him out, as well as the viewpoint of the painting; looking at the scene through the window as though someone is looking in on them, which gives the fish bowl sense of feeling.

This painting reminds me of a photograph of Yokomizo who uses photography and video to examine the relationship between herself and the other. Looking beyond the similarities of a usual photo to leave what remains unseen to its audience, she captures the unlikely encounter of photographer and subject in a way full of awareness and once again that sense of tension. Her series 'stranger' centers around a momentary confrontation between herself and the person within their window, in which both did not know each other, just by a note sent through the letter box of the subject saying - 'Be at your window - and what time e.g. 8:30pm'.