Staged Photography
Giving the artist the opportunity to make very specific and careful choices
Staged photography concerns the photographic image that has been arranged or set-up. Artists have long utilized the medium of photography to create a contrived environment, scene or vignette to communicate something other than the decisive moment typical of the opportunist snap or documentary image traditionally associated with the medium.
Staging gives the artist the opportunity to make very specific and careful choices, in order to control every element and even sometimes to give the appearance of spontaneity. With or without models, staged photography can be broken down into several categories; ranging from fantastical scenes impossible to contemplate in reality, to trompel’oeil exercises in technical virtuosity often set up in a studio, to full movie production tableaux vivants.
Staged Photographies
Artists Gregory Crewdson, Erwin Olaf, Jeff Wall, Alex Prager, Thomas Demand, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Mickalene Thomas, and Pierre et Gilles are among the top artists in stage photography.
In this age of Instagram, and pictures on cell phones, and social media, it’s a real challenge to think of the photograph still meaning something important
Gregory Crewdson