An untitled staged photograph from the book Twilight. By Gregory Crewdson, the photo depicts a woman inside a house sitting in a garden of flowers.
(2 of 2)
But there it is. At its weakest, staged photography succumbs to the temptation to imitate the staged worlds we see every day in movies and advertising. It adopts their shopworn postures in the hope of pushing our most familiar buttons. This happens in the work of the collective of four Russian artists who operate under the name AES&F. Their pictures of kids flourishing heavy weaponry in futuristic wastelands count too much on our response to the poses of fashion photography. Maybe you can arrive at some sleek, sexy images that way. But at that point, you're not making conceptual art. You're trying out for the next Prada campaign.