A study on the impact of mise-en-scene and cinema narration on staged photography with a look at the works of Gregory Crewdson

Years before cinema, photography has been known as an influential art among the people. An art that is unique in recording events, moments and memories. With its content, technical, and instrumental features, this art was able to affect cinema, which was originally considered a social phenomenon, and cinema owes much in achieving artistic status and creating an independent language to this industry art. After getting the technical and artistic knowledge of photography, cinema is influenced by other arts and in order to attract the audience's attention, it needs storytelling. Hence it considered narration and the arrangement of elements in the frame. In its historical course and evolution, cinema has now been considered and used in the arts, including photography. Staged photography is one of these types of cinema exploitation that can be seen in various countries, including Iran. Gregory Crewdson is one of the world's leading photographers with high position in the world. Crewdson is Professor Adjunct in Graduate Photography at the Yale University School of Art and lives and works in New York. Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn in 1962. Crewdson received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1985 and an M.F.A. in photography at Yale in 1988. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York and White Cube in London. Crewdson is recognized for his elaborately staged scenes of small town American life. His photographs have dramatic and cinematic qualities, and he often has an extensive support crew on site for proper staging and lighting. Crewdson's work has been included in many public collections, most notably the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A retrospective of his work from 1985–2005, was shown at major museums around Europe from 2005–08. Another exhibition of his work opened at the Kulturhuset Museum, Stockholm, in February 2011, followed by Sorte Diamant, Copenhagen and c/o Berlin, among others. Crewdson has received numerous awards including the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship and the Aaron Siskind Fellowship. The present study was applied and the perception of the importance of knowledge production is performed. The main problem of the research is the analysis of the staging characteristics and film narration in staged photography. It is a qualitative research method with a descriptive-analytical approach that with purposeful selection, three samples of Crewdson photographs have been investigated. The result shows that Crewdson acts like a film director in storytelling and staging the scene for his photographs, and the imaginary space generated by him is believable, natural, and real to the audience.