Controlling chance with the artist Fred Cray '79.
By Jeffrey Lott ’73
If you think a photograph captures a moment in time—the “decisive moment,” as Henri Cartier-Bresson so famously described it—you could miss the point of Fred Cray’s work.
By deftly juxtaposing and combining visual components, Cray lends the element of time to his carefully crafted pictures. And by using features of poetry—simile, symbol, and metaphor—he leaps into the realms of memory and emotion.
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| Detail of a photograph by Fred Cray "79. By juxtaposing seemingly ordinary images, Cray constructs evocative narratives, both fleeting and far-reaching. |
“My work transcends the capture of a single moment,” Cray says in his Brooklyn studio, where the walls are jammed with pictures, arranged singly or in groups. Among them are images of great and not-so-great art, street scenes, glimpsed happenings, everyday encounters, and screen shots of TV shows. These are the raw materials with which Cray builds from the serendipitous to the fateful—as if he’s taking pictures of chance itself. Or of time, the constant companion of chance, which is delightfully defined as “the assumed impersonal purposeless determiner of unaccountable happenings.” [Webster’s 10th]
Cray’s best-known photographs are his “two-minute self-portraits,” which he created by standing before an open lens for that period of time, combining natural- motion blur with intentional movement to haunting effect. Often, he shaves his head or puts on makeup for these pictures. In them, he stops being Fred Cray and becomes an almost featureless cipher, an everyman. In his collage-like “Travel Diaries,” Cray’s juxtaposition of seemingly ordinary images becomes narrative and evocative, witty and humorous, both fleeting and far-reaching. “They approximate the cacophony that you experience when you travel—a lot like the noise that goes on in your head,” says Janet Borden, who shows Cray’s work at her Greenwich Village gallery.
“He’s an astonishing chooser of images,” says John Hunisak, a professor of history of art and architecture. He’s kept in constant contact with Cray since his graduation and says that “for all of the ‘newness’ of his art, it is fundamentally grounded in art history and an intense understanding of what has come before.”
Others describe Cray as both inventive and smart. “He’s brilliant—period,” says David Bumbeck, professor emeritus of studio art. “I learned more from him than he did from me.” Borden adds, “I like artists to be smart. It has to be within their brain, not just in the product. Fred’s work is really, really smart.”
At Middlebury, Cray took as many English courses as art courses. Known both for his poetry and his large abstract paintings, Cray “was also always taking photographs,” says Hunisak. After college, Cray enrolled in the Yale Graduate School of Fine Arts, thinking to get an M.F.A. in painting, but he did not finish the program. He also studied at the Skowhegan School and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003.
“I was influenced by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—their collage-oriented work,” Cray says. “I found the physical aspects of painting satisfying, but I was afraid it might be a dead end—that if I kept painting, I wouldn’t be able to evolve in an organic way. I loved both art and literature, and I wanted to be able to continue those kinds of thought processes.”
Photography has allowed him to keep his head in both worlds. Thus, Cray’s subject is not so much in front of the camera as behind it. What he sees and experiences is recorded on film and brought to expression through what he calls “controlled chance.”
His recent series “Labyrinths”—large, richly layered, dreamlike pictures—also includes lines of text meant to further jog the viewer’s consciousness. By carefully choosing images and textures that are layered multiple exposures, Cray retains some control over the input but still leaves much to chance, to what happens in the camera. The words are added later—phrases like “this is exactly how it happened”; “there’s no problem, you’re the problem;” and, in a work that includes his late father photographed shortly after his death, “So where do we start?” Cray emphasizes that these are not titles, which he eschews entirely, because “they can preclude other things.”
Especially in his self-portraits, Cray also manipulates what’s in front of the camera to create images that range from the theatrical to the ethereal. Since about 1991, he has variously photographed himself in black makeup against a black background, buried himself alive, covered himself with worms, painted his nude body silver, and (with the help of a magic performer) set himself on fire. When he began doing self-portraits, he says it became clear almost immediately that “I wasn’t trying to show what I looked like. I was trying to transcend what I looked like—to create a kind of ‘dark figure’ that references historical and literal things outside itself.”
One of Cray’s current projects is photographing people in uniform. The series started after 9/11 with close-up pictures of New York City police officers. “I was upset by the crackdown on individual liberties, the security cameras everywhere, and the loss of personal space we take for granted,” Cray says. “I wanted to get up close and photograph people that I wouldn’t normally gravitate to.” Sometimes he got too close: During the 2004 Republican convention in New York, Cray was briefly detained because “according to the authorities I exhibited excessive interest in military personnel.”
The portraits are straightforward, in sharp focus, and unadorned. Although intended to be exhibited as a group, each has its own authority. And, by their nature, they seem more traditionally documentary—somehow more “objective” than much of Cray’s previous work.
Yet he says that objectivity in photography, if it ever existed, “isn’t a given anymore. Not many people claim that photography has to represent the world. Photography has become whatever you want to use it for.”
Photography, like painting and literature, has always carried meaning and metaphor,—perhaps the reason that a picture is said to be worth 1,000 words (about the length of this magazine story). Fred Cray makes images that look like one thing and mean another. They are neither objective nor definitive, but rather subjective and, in a syntactic sense, infinitive. They become aide-mémoire—or, as Hunisak suggests, memento mori—for both the artist and his audience.
As an artist, Cray asks about his work: “Is it my thinking? Or is it prompting others to think? Who is the ‘I’ or ‘we?’ Sometimes the ‘I’ is not the artist but the viewer.”
“I’m trying to remind people that we have our own inner monologues,” he says. “Sometimes we understand each other, but other times we make assumptions about other people. Sometimes our relationships are often more projected than actual.”
Jeffrey Lott ’73 majored in studio art at Middlebury. He is editor of the alumni magazine of Swarthmore College.
To view more of Fred Cray’s work online, visit http://www.janetbordeninc.com/current/