I was first introduced to him at the Unit brief by phil, from what i could gather he was the big shot of the uncanny genre. So I had a look through several of the photographs he has taken. Each seem to carry a sense off unease and has a eerie feeling to it, which made me think about the stories behind each of the pictures. What was Gregory trying to tell through the the photos and how he used the characters in the photos to portray it to the audiences.
I saw a few of his photographs at the brief so I went ahead and started looking through some of the work he had done. This piece, it seems to be a family dinner, a lovely family house with photos on the walls, its clean and tidy. However when you look more carefully you begin to realise that something is off with picture. Then you realise that there are four plates on the table, one of the chairs is pushed to the side at an angle. This makes you wonder was there a fight here or an argument? did someone walk away from this stereotypical scene of a family dinner.
Many different thoughts came to my mind while i was looking at the picture, when you start looking closer at the characters at the table you realise they are not happy at all, their expression indicate to us that they are sad and lost in thoughts. The lighting used in the scene has an uneasy teel to it, there is a lot of shadows, dinning areas are normally well lit. So now we start to realise under the first perfect family dinner picture there is deeper story underling this picture. These characters almost seem to be frozen each in there own emotions, this is almost a perfect picture for creating a sense of ambiguity, we will never really know what happened here, we can only make assumptions about the picture.
This next scene is rather strange, i love the way he uses his camera and the height of the camera to portray a strange sense of stillness in his pictures, to me it feels like the people or the characters are moving but yet they are still. I would say Gregory know exactly how to tell a story or give a message using these still shots. If you take a look at the scene its of a pregnant woman crossing the road, to me she looks like she is still in her night dress. To me this indicates that she might not have been aware that she was crossing a road, as why would a pregnant women goes for a walk so early. There is this strange spotlight on the female character as well, even thought it might not be very evident you can see that there is a beam of light coming from the sky. Once again he does a wonderful job at creating a picture that is uncanny.
Last but not least this was another piece of work that caught my eye, a man standing outside his car the briefcase is on the road and its raining hard. What would make someone do that i wonder. Once again this picture has a very uncanny feel to it, as its not normal. Was he maybe fired from his job? or was it something else. I have noticed as i went through Gregory's pictures that he loves playing with his camera and that he takes a liking to using roads. cars and people in majority of his pieces. The wonder aspect of his work is the sense of ambiguity in all of his work, you can never make your mind up about what's going on.
Once again these thoughts and research will help me out when I do my scenes for this project, as i plan to make a scene that has ambiguity and uncanniness in it.
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