Last Project 2002

Arsen Savadov made this photograph titled "Last Project," and what I'm drawn to is how he seems to be staging a kind of a scene. It’s all so carefully placed, from the blanket on the forest floor, to the women hugging a tree to which someone has affixed a painting. The light itself is a character, dappled and diffused, creating a cinematic tableau. The photograph is a meditation on artmaking and its relationship to nature, to life and to death, or maybe rest. Like Jeff Wall and other artists who stage photographs, Savadov seems interested in the artifice of image-making, reminding us that what we are seeing is not a slice of life, but a carefully constructed fiction. He reminds me a bit of Gregory Crewdson, actually, with his uncanny ability to create worlds that feel both familiar and deeply unsettling. But where Crewdson's images often feel hyper-real, Savadov's have a more intimate, almost melancholic quality, as if he's inviting us to witness a private moment of reflection amidst the grandeur of the natural world.