In Gregory Crewdson's Ophelia, we find a staged, high-end production photograph of a flooded house.
The flooded house is a sad scene in itself, but Crewdson pushes the
sadness further by adding the corpse of a dead woman and leaves the viewer to
wonder what exactly happened. There is also something intriguing about the
woman's body in that it does not seem to actually be floating, but resting on
something flat, which also makes us wonder what all is under that water.
Crewdson uses the light through the window and the light of
lamps (which would not be working in a flooded house) to contrast with the
darkness and heaviness of the water. The
focal point of the photograph is a woman's horizontal dead body in the water
and our eyes are drawn to her in the lower third of the composition by the
lines of the staircase. There is also a
balance between the calm stillness of the water where something tragic has
happened and the busy normalcy in the top half of the photo.
Being a fan of Hamlet, I was automatically drawn to this
picture because of the title. Ophelia
was Hamlet's lover who was driven mad and ended up drowning herself in a
river. After looking at this photo and
the others we had to choose from, I kept going back to look at the woman to see
if there was any other similarities. I
also was drawn to the balances between dark and light, and the calmness of the
bottom half and busyness of the top half.
Because of the title, I was not
left wondering what happened - I feel like it tells me that this woman drowned
herself just like Hamlet's Ophelia.
