Early Work (1986-1988)
A Revelation About Light
PREPARING FOR A RETROSPECTIVE that spans four decades was a process that took over a year. We revisited negatives and contact prints I hadn’t looked at in years. The show, (at the Albertina Museum, Vienna) includes nine bodies of work, made between 1986 and 2022, and begins with Early Work, 1986-1988, pictures I made while a graduate student at Yale. The above picture hangs in the first gallery as one enters the show, and is perhaps the most important picture in that series. It was a turning point for my work, and informed every picture I made after.
The ball field you see through the window in the picture is Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, MA. In the summer of 1987, I spent many weeks making pictures there, a minor league baseball field (home of the Pittsfield Cubs at that time, now the Pittsfield Suns). I was in between my first and second years at Yale. My first interest was with the quintessentially American ritual of people attending the games — families arriving in their cars, teenage kids working the ticket booths and food stands as summer jobs, the announcers, the national anthem, the many innings, the kids wanting autographs from the players, and the beauty of the baseball game itself, the way it exists in its own time, and its relationship to the pastoral, and the search for home. I did photograph all of that. But what I wound up most fascinated with, was the light.
On the occasion of the retrospective, I’m doing a series of nine posts, one for each body of work in the show. I thought I’d share some outtakes from Early Work, most if not all of which have never even been printed, let alone shown publicly.
The field at Wahconah Park faces west, which I believe is rare as far as ball parks go. Many nights, before twilight, the umpires call for a pause until the sun dips below the horizon because it’s too blinding for the batters to even see the ball. Photographically, the moment the games came alive for me was when the field lights came on.
At a certain point in the summer, I left the games and started spending more time on the perimeter of the field. I was noticing the way the light from the lamps fell on the surrounding natural landscape and the adjacent neighborhoods just beyond. The light imbued the ordinary domestic landscape with a sense of heightened narrative.
The picture at the top of this piece, using the window as a framing device, the intersection of a domestic space and something transcendent, light being used as a narrative code, simple as these things may be, are at the core of almost every picture I’ve made since.
This piece is the first in a multi-part series commemorating the opening of Gregory Crewdson: Retrospektive, at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria. The exhibition runs May 29-Sept. 8 2024. You can find more information here.
The Crewdson Trail Log is edited and written by Juliane Hiam, in collaboration with Gregory, based on his words and stories.
What a cool peek into the origin story!
Great insight and photos. Looking forward to part 2!