Picturesque and Sublime

When people refer to the an image as ‘pictureseque’ it always, for me, brings to mind the typical images that are found on Christmas cards – The old stone villages, freshly fallen snow, robins perched up on a fence post. And I guess, although a picturesque scene does sit in the realm of reality – it is at the far end of the scale - an example of a perfect scene, an almost imaginary time that is unlikely to be seen very often.

Gregory Crewdson

An artist I came across while looking into the sublime and the picturesque was the photographer Gregory Crewdson. I was instantly drawn to the photographs of Gregory Crewdson. At first glance they seemed to fit right in to the subject of the picturesque but as I looked deeper into his work it soon became apparent that there was a message more disturbing than that of a picturesque scene.

“Crewdsons 1995 forensic photographs of fetid body parts address this voyeuristic and particularly American fear that among the nightshade berries and unfurling ferns, we will find a body, or worse, a piece of body. Like Duchamps’s Etant Donnes, these photographs reach into the lexicon of fairy tale, that place where sexual awakening and violence are bedfellows” (Darcey Steinke, p11, Dream of Life)

(Untitled, Gregory Crewdson)

In this image Crewdson uses a suburban picturesque scene. Bright sunlit buildings and colourful flowers give the impression of a peaceful, tranquil scene,  and in contrast to this scene he uses the morbid subject of a decomposing arm, leading the viewer to imagine what lies just outside of the frame.

(Untitled, Gregory Crewdson)

Again in this scene Crewdson has the backdrop as a bright rural setting (seen between the gaps in the fence) but the subject is clearly the litter strewn habitat that the wildlife occupies. The message here is, perhaps, the destruction of the picturesque? Or what dark details are found if you delve deeper into a picturesque scene?

Although the photographs when looked at as a whole are not examples of a picturesque image, crewdson uses the picturesque to contrast the vulgar. And perhaps the resulting photographs, when using the correct definition of the term, is an example of a sublime image rather than an image of something sublime?

Sources

Gregory Crewdson. (January 1999), Dream of Life, Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.