In a Lonely Place, last month's exhibition at the C/O, brought together three series of works from New York based photographer Gregory Crewdson. Disturbing and beautiful, his work tests the boundaries between reality and fiction, nature and artifice, photography and film, de-familiarising the spectator from mundane, recognisable environments. One series in particular made this exhibition a must-see...
Classic documentary photography and a dream-like cinematic vision combine in Crewdson’s most iconic series. Set amongst American suburbia, Beneath the Roses (2003-2008) presents a collection of large-format photographs each depicting a precisely choreographed situation shrouded in mystery. Following in the tradition of ‘staged photography’, these images each appear in the manner of a film still for a non-existent Hollywood movie. Their stasis and silence impinges upon the spectator: they are what he calls ‘frozen moments’.
The anonymous streetscapes and interiors Crewdson captures seem to belong to nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Figures are caught amongst them in a series of suggestive tableau: an old woman stands naked in her bedroom, her hands hanging impassively by her sides, whilst a mother and son sit expressionlessly at an immaculate dinner table. Bathed in blue artificial light, their skin waxen and deathly, they stare into space or at the sky as though waiting. But for what? This is a portrait of domestic life gone horribly wrong, an apocalyptic vision of the American Dream in which civilisation appears inexplicably threatened, suddenly reduced to nothing but a series of deserted streets, overgrown front gardens, abandoned train tracks and derelict houses in flames. Yet, despite this continual sense of impending doom, no immediate violence is apparent.
Crewdson’s artistic method is, for the sake of a single image, monumentally labour intensive: what begins as a single image plucked from his imagination escalates into a grand-scale project involving a team of professionals working under his direction, not to mention months spent location scouting before production even begins. Interiors are constructed as set pieces entirely from scratch and manipulated down to the last detail through highly sophisticated lighting effects. With the production value of a feature length film, it comes as no surprise that Crewdson’s greatest aesthetic influences include the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg. There is a voyeuristic perspective to many of these photographs reminiscent of Rear Window, figures framed mysteriously in doorways and windows, and his brooding photographic vision borrows heavily from film noir motifs. The aesthetic style and thematic concerns of David Lynch’s cult classic Blue Velvet is also apparent.
The photographs that make up Beneath the Roses are more than eerie; they are charged with a tension that is hard to put your finger on. Like the paintings of Edward Hopper, these photographs speak of paranoia and alienation whilst existing outside the context of any concrete narrative framework. It is true to say that this depiction of small town America is one countless artists of all disciplines have examined for decades, and says little that we haven’t heard before. Yet the concept behind Crewdson’s work takes what may be otherwise seen as rather worn subject matter and transforms it into something surprisingly original. Aware, as he claims, of the ‘limitations of a photograph in terms of narrative capacity to have an image that is frozen in time, (where) there’s no before or after’, the artist has transformed this weakness into a strength. As a result his photographs unsettle and tease the spectator: like incomplete sentences, they throw up a multitude of questions whilst offering no easy solutions, leaving you to fill in the gaps. Tellingly, Crewdson has a habit of photographing pregnant women, an apt metaphor for this state of limbo. Indeed, the entire collection here may be seen as a series of impregnated moments. Even the traffic lights are eternally on amber.
Crewdson’s interest in cinema continued elsewhere in the exhibition, in another series entitled Santuary (2009), which re-discovers the legendary Cinecitta studios in Rome, once associated with the film-maker Fellini, now in ruins. Here, Crewdson moves towards documentary photography in his depiction of a past-glory which tells the story of abandonment and neglect. These photographs made for interesting comparative viewing alongside the staged scenarios of Beneath the Roses, as did his work in contrast to Sibylle Bergemann’s exhibition of Polaroids: whilst Bergemann’s tiny and delicate photographs relied heavily upon chance occurrences, Crewdson actively eliminated this possibility through his supreme level of manipulation and control.
The attached images here cannot hope to do these photographs any justice. Like a spectacular film with visuals that demand to be viewed on the big screen, these photos had be seen in all their glossy, panoramic detail to be appreciated. So don't miss C/O's next exhibition!!
