Gregory Crewdson - Picture Window

Gregory Crewdson is a major figure in photography and has been painting a meditative portrait of middle-class America for three decades, a country whose wide-open eyes have been blinded by the lights of an exhausted dream. His photographs, which combine an autobiographical dimension with the portrait of an America fallen from grace, are inspired by washed-out lights and deserted streets, and staged like movie scenes to produce photographs that seem to be snapshots from non-existent films.

Crewdson blurs the boundaries between cinema and photography, designing his works like film stills, featuring enigmatic characters and situations revealing the dark side of the American dream. His elaborately composed scenes, dramatised by sophisticated lighting in natural or artificial settings, are at once dreamlike and strikingly real, creating a feeling of “disturbing strangeness” into seemingly familiar contexts. Adopting style elements from film noir, psychological drama and fantasy, his photos deliberately trigger a sense of déjà vu that accentuates their disturbing, hallucinatory quality.

His attraction to the strangeness and mystery concealed by the reassuring appearances of small-town America brings him stylistically closer to David Lynch, particularly Blue Velvet, in which the camera dives into the grass to discover a human ear crawling with ants. Since the mid-1990s and his Hover series (1996–1997), the central theme of his work was established: the day-to-day life of small rural America as a stage for the psychological study of repressed desires, anxieties and fears. The photos’ sobriety and austerity have a vaguely documentary quality, contrasting with the artist’s works that followed, notably including the Dream House series (2002), richer in detail and colour.

This series of large-format photos, in nocturnal and crepuscular ambiences, are set at the time of day when the power of reason gives way to dark forces and energies, this time going so far as to penetrate the home. From that moment, Crewdson started working with a complete film crew, like a director, meticulously planning his productions. The works in the Cathedral of the Pines series (2014) signal an important phase because of the intimacy they exude, crystallised by the places where they were made, linked to the life of the photographer, his partner and collaborator Juliane Hiam, and their children.