In my post on Pascal Dangin, image-enhancer ( The Artist and the Artisan) I said:

But with the advent of so-called ‘photo-based art’ it has become increasingly evident that the photographer steps aside after taking the picture; the making of the fine-art object involves the handiwork of a shadowy coterie of retouchers, printers, exhibition designers and framers.

Gregory Crewdson, Twilight, 2001

This is certainly true of one photographer, Gregory Crewdson, and it is to be expected; after all, Crewdson’s elaborately produced scenarios are like film stills, and almost as expensive to produce as a film. Nevertheless, the sheer number of people required to realize the photographer’s vision is staggering. I recently received Crewdson’s book, “Beneath the Roses” – a fine book with remarkable images – and in the back there are three pages of credits acknowledging the efforts of literally hundreds of people who assist Crewdson in the making of his photographs. There are familiar titles from the world of cinema – “best boy; “gaffers”; “key grips” - and other roles which are baffling such as “greensman” and “acquarist”. There are more familiar credits for “set dressers”, “production assistants”; “carpenters” and even a credit for “weather prognosticator.” But nowhere do I find a credit for digital image-enhancement. In the “post-production” section there are credits which come close: There’s a “master printer/digital artist”, a “visual effects supervisor”, and a “computer graphics supervisor.”

And speaking of the final image, the one person who isn’t credited in these back pages is the artist himself, Gregory Crewdson. How unlike the world of film where the film director often gives him or herself three or more credits to everyone else’s one. What would Crewdson’s credit be? “Visioneer?” Or more radically, “photographer?”

After writing the above, I came across Aperture’s website, where many of the roles of Crewdson’s collaborators are explained, including that of Kylie Wright, Crewdson’s “master printer/digital artist”. I only wish they had included these interviews in the book itself. For the rest, in the interest of keeping a post short I recommend you go to http://www.aperture.org/crewdson/

The book has a fine essay by one of my favorite writers, Russell Banks, in which he knowledgeably discusses the photographer’s relationship to the world of film. Oddly, he scarcely touches on the locale of most of the photographs which are the dispossessed factory towns of New England. The dilapidated houses of such towns as North Adams, Ma., built during the Great Depression or earlier, give the photographs their aura in which people seem to inhabit a kind of purgatory where they are doomed to re-live ambiguous moments from their past.

Gregory Crewdson, Twilight 2001

This too, is the territory of Russell Banks who might be considered a poet of that hard-scrabble New England where time seems to have stopped. I lived in New England myself for a number of years and a while ago I copied this word-picture from Bank’s writing because it rang absolutely true:

“…Past the pink and aqua house trailers along the road, the two-room shacks with rusted stove pipes poking through the roofs, the old farmhouses boarded up or halfcovered against the winter with flapping sheets of polyethylene, the fields compulsively cleared by long-dead generations of Yankee farmers gone now, in this generation, scrubby choke- cherry and gnarled stunted birch, saw the gap- toothed children with matted hair and dirty rashes on their round faces playing by the side of the road, glimpsed in windows the blank gray faces of young women and the old men’s and old women’s faces collapsing like rotted fruit, the broken toys and tools and ravaged carcasses of old cars lying randomly in the packed-dirt yards, the scrawny yellow mongrels nastily barking from the doorsteps at my passing car… Scattered over the fields in no discernible pattern were ten or twelve rusting shells of windowless cars and trucks, some of them further decomposed and more nearly destroyed than others, also … an outhouse lying awkwardly on its side, rusty bedsprings and swollen mattresses spitting yellowish stuffing onto the ground, a pile of fifty-gallon oil drums, an engine block and a transmission housing, both lying atop a child’s crushed red wagon which lay atop an American Flyer sled in splinters, next: to a refrigerator (with the door invitingly open, I noticed ), and a red, overstuffed couch which had been partially destroyed by fire…”

Russell Banks from his novel “Hamilton Stark”.