PHOTO: Gregory Crewdson-Eveningside
Gregory Crewdson is recognized for his elaborately staged scenes of small town American life. His photographs have dramatic and cinematic qualities, and he often has an extensive support crew on site for proper staging and lighting. His photographs have take their place alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as indelible evocations of a silent psychological interzone between the everyday and the uncanny.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gallerie Daniel Templon Archive
Gregory Crewdson is unveiling his latest work in Paris with “Eveningside”, a series of black-and-white pieces created between 2021 and 2022. This final instalment in a trilogy he has been working on since 2012 features twenty panoramic photographs characterised by their disturbing clarity and twilight mood. A pioneer of large-scale photography, Gregory Crewdson has been developing a unique photographic language over the last thirty years. Each shot is the result of a lengthy pre-production process involving storyboards, actors, set building, technicians, special effects and sophisticated lighting. The “Eveningside” exhibition was held this summer as part of a retrospective at the Arles Rencontres de la Photographie event. Gregory Crewdson uses it to push the boundary between reality and fiction even further. He invents ambiguous suburban landscapes where the motionlessness of the characters, frozen in the most ordinary of daily activities, is both fascinating and disquieting. A fictional portrait of an America in an unidentifiable era, the scenes depict solitary figures, often captured through a complex interplay of mirrors, storefronts or places of transition: bridges, porches, mini-markets and hardware stores. His black-and-white palette draws skilfully on a series of special effects – fog, smoke and rain – to create atmospheres as melancholy as they are gothic, bringing to mind classical cinema, film noir and the realism of Edward Hopper’s paintings. Gregory Crewdson’s work oscillates between the vulnerability of the human condition and the paradoxes of the American dream. The complexity of the monochrome tones and their strange beauty offer a powerful metaphor for the unendurable limits of our hyper-connected world, digital and blinded. Crewdson is never didactic, leaving the viewer free to imagine the stories hidden beneath the surface and dream of other possibilities. In “Eveningside” (2021-22), Crewdson explores moments of contemplation within the confines of quotidian life; in places of employment, and in moments just outside of those work structures. The figures populating the pictures are sparse, and are often seen through storefront windows, in mirror reflections, or positioned underneath the mundane proscenium found in the midst of their everyday routines: railroad bridges, doorways, porches, the overhanging roofline of a bank teller drive-through, a dairy bar, a corner market, or a hardware store. Bringing his vantage point closer to the figures, using a heightened range of light and darkness, special effects such as fog, rain, smoke and haze, and for the first time using his now ubiquitous full production and lighting team in a monochromatic palette, the result is a rich gothic atmosphere, evocative of film noir and classic cinema, but with the capabilities and clarity of the most current technology available in digital photography.
Photo: Gregory Crewdson, Eveningside Tattoo, 2021-2022, Digital pigment print mounted to Dibond, 87,5 × 117 cm — 34 1/2 × 46 in., © Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy the artist and Gallerie Daniel Templon
Info: Gallerie Daniel Templon, 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, Duration: 8/11-23/12/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.danieltemplon.com
