The Postcard
A Valentine's Series postcard featuring an image which is a glossy real photograph.
The card was posted in Grantham, Lincs. on Wednesday the 26th. September 1962 to:
Miss H. Douglas,
4 Townsend,
Woodford Halse,
Rugby,
Warwicks.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"We had a grand day
here yesterday. Weather
better than at Whitby -
considerably warmer.
Went to Skegness for
the day on Monday.
Good weather there.
No plans for the rest
of the week.
Going to Nottingham
on Saturday.
With lots of love,
J. A. & C."
Cleethorpes
Cleethorpes is a seaside town on the estuary of the Humber in North East Lincolnshire with a population of 38,372 in 2020. It has been permanently occupied since the 6th. century, with fishing as its original industry, then developing into a resort in the 19th century.
The town lies on the Greenwich meridian, and its average annual rainfall is amongst the lowest in the British Isles.
In 2021, The Trainline named Cleethorpes beach the second best seaside destination in the UK that is reachable by train, just behind Margate.
Gregory Crewdson
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, the 26th. September 1962 marked the birth of Gregory Crewdson. Gregory is a fine-art photographer, landscape photographer, and professor. He specialises in photographing tableaux of American homes and neighbourhoods.
Crewdson was born in the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York. He attended John Dewey High School, graduating early.
As a teenager, he was part of a punk rock group called The Speedies that hit the New York scene. Their song, 'Let Me Take Your Photo' proved to be prophetic to Crewdson's future career. In 2005, Hewlett Packard used the song in advertisements to promote its digital cameras.
At Purchase College, State University of New York, he began experimenting with photography, although not yet taking it seriously, Crewdson only saw it as a creative outlet and hobby.
Gaining school recognition and a growing interest for art, he graduated from SUNY Purchase and later attended Yale University receiving his Master of Fine Arts. His senior thesis embodied everyday life through portraiture of Lee, Massachusetts residents, the same location that later inspired his first series Natural Wonder from 1992 to 1997.
He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Cooper Union, Vassar College, and Yale University, where he has been on the faculty since 1993. He is now a professor at the Yale University School of Art.
In 2012, he was the subject of the feature documentary film Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. The film series followed the construction and the behind-the-scenes explanation from Crewdson himself of his thought process and vision for his pieces of his collection Beneath the Roses.
Crewdson is represented by Gagosian Gallery worldwide and by the White Cube Gallery in London.
-- Crewdson's Style
Crewdson's photographs usually take place in small-town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. His photographs are elaborately staged and lit using crews familiar with motion picture production and lighting large scenes using motion picture film equipment and techniques.
He has cited the films Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe as having influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus.
Crewdson's photography became a mix between his formal photography education and his experimentation with the ethereal perspective of life and death, a mix of lively pigmentation and morbid details within a traditional suburbia setting.
Crewdson was unknowingly in the making of the Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, earning him a following both from his previous educators and what would become his future agents and promoters of his work.
The grotesque yet beautifully created scenes were just the beginning of Crewdson's work, all affected with the same narrative mystery he was so inspired by in his childhood and keen eye for the surreal within the regular.
Gregory Crewdson's most recognized and iconic collection is Beneath the Roses, similar to his previous projects, its haunted urgency and profound dislocation from the audience is uncomfortable yet familiar.
Beneath the Roses was aimed to capture cinematic production in the stillness of one picture. With a budget similar to that of a small movie production, each image involved hundreds of people and weeks to months of planning.
Crewdson explored the idea of challenging tradition with experimentation of his title outside of the U.S. at the abandoned Cinecittá studios outside of Rome. Known for its mysterious stillness and emptied character, the set was new to Crewdson's typical use of subject and storyline but reflected the same balance and organic nature of a created set turned into an art piece.
After years of exploring the idea of cinematic photography, Sanctuary was Crewdson's return to photography, his original hobby and technical training.
Most recently, Crewdson has created Cathedral of the Pines, similar to Beneath the Roses and Twilight, a distanced interpretation of exaggerated drama by an intervention into natural in its most synergetic state. The collection was shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York City. The collection returns to his early photographic origins in Becket, Massachusetts set deep in the woods far from familiarity of subject and setting.