Gregory Crewdson’s ‘In a Lonely Place’
Gregory Crewdson’s ‘In a Lonely Place’, recently hosted by the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, brings together pieces from three series, his ‘Fireflies’ (1996), ‘Beneath the Roses’ (2003–2008), and ‘Sanctuary’ (2010). The large-scale, colour photographs selected from ‘Beneath the Roses’ dominate the show and are the sort of work for which the photographer is famous: elaborately staged, meticulously manipulated images that evoke the anxieties underpinning life in America. They focus attention on the sort of dead-alive small towns that abound in the United States, the sort of towns that drivers ignore, passengers sleep through, and no one stops in, unless they live there. These forgettable and forgotten, somehow inward-looking spaces of America are rendered with weird clarity, thanks to Crewdson’s elaborate process of production and post-production that illuminates them with light that is at once dramatic and theatrical, the stuff of movie sets, but also suggestive of those klieg-lit moments that precede a big storm. (Generally speaking, light is, in Crewdson’s work, what shadow is in film noir—expressive, ominous, and transformative.) The effect of this light is both narrative and atavistic, even as it focuses attention on those tiny-but-distinct details of domestic drama, those hints of mysterious scenarios captured in medias res: a trickle of blood here, a not-quite-hidden liquor bottle there, tire tracks in dirty snow, inexplicably bare feet, naked bodies, and cloaked expressions.
In their theatricality and expressivity, in the way that they draw attention to the most mundane of American settings and make it strange, Crewdson’s photographs draw on that same Gothic Romantic literary tradition whose influence (filtered through Hollywood, genres of horror and noir in particular) is currently so strong in cinema and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Untitled (Shane), 2006. From ‘Beneath the Roses’. © Gregory Crewdson. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.
Untitled (Sunday Roast), 2003–2005. From ‘Beneath the Roses’. © Gregory Crewdson. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.
