The Brooklyn Rail

Photographer Gregory Crewdson has, since his 1986–88 Early Work—the product of his Yale School of Art MFA thesis—straddled and mined the difference between photograph and film to mixed results. A new book, Gregory Crewdson, is the first retrospective book on the photographer’s work, including selections from each of the photographer’s major series (published to coincide with a retrospective at the Albertina Museum). Across its 280 pages of photographs and essays, we can trace the development of Crewdson’s work from the mid-eighties until now, observing how he has refined and purified his images according to an increasingly planned and precise vision.

Crewdson’s work is always staged, meticulously so, and has, as a result, often been called “cinematic” by critics and admirers. The photographer himself acknowledges David Lynch as a major influence, particularly the film Blue Velvet—which, like so many of Crewdson’s photographs, explores the violence and everyday artifice of suburban settings. Crewdson constructs many of his photographs much like a director constructs a film: purpose-built sets, crane shots, precise stage direction. An extended series of behind-the-scenes photographs situated in the middle of the book appear as if taken from a film or TV set. Crewdson’s works are significant and collaborative undertakings, requiring large crews working to prepare the subjects and objects for their appearances before he ever clicks the shutter. Crewdson’s proximity to film always risks turning his work into pastiche—the work of a technically gifted photographer, sure, but mostly the work of an admiring fan. And indeed, the more straightforwardly cinematic Crewdson’s iconography, the more his work begins to feel like an imitation of some inchoate and imaginary film—or worse, recreations of already completed movies.

Beate Hofstadler notes in her contribution to the book, “Lonely and Alone—Psychoanalytical Comments on Gregory Crewdson’s Photographs” that many Crewdson photographs “could just as easily be nightmarish stills from films by directors Steven Spielberg, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch,” and others. In a different essay, David Fincher (whose contribution is fun, if not especially illuminating), compares Crewdson to Alfred Hitchcock, Terence Fisher, and Spielberg (again). This is not purely descriptive, but rather part of the merit of Crewdson’s work. Matthieu Orléan writes that, in Crewdson’s work, the photograph “tends asymptotically” towards the “cinema, the art of exponential successions of ‘pure presents’… without ever wanting or daring to attain it. Crewdson’s images are photographic, but they are also its state of limit: they contain all the powerful possibilities of cinema.”

Indeed, the cinematic quality of Crewdson’s oeuvre is the core component of its originality, but this originality does not spring from Crewdson’s ability to ape filmic images, it lies in his ability to draw out the tension between the motion implied by cinematic visual language and the motionlessness of the photographic image. Crewdson’s photographs are almost always extraordinarily large. He exclusively uses large-format cameras and often will digitally combine a series of images to create an infinite depth of field. Every work in “Twilight” (1998–2002), for instance, is an imposing 48 by 60 inches in its original form. The hyper sharpness of the works renders them overwhelming—there is simply too much visual information, and absent the focusing effect of a limited depth of field, the eye is set gliding across a smooth visual plane. This can heighten the uncanny effect of the work—a lack of resistance, objects and subjects given over increasingly to indistinction.

Unlike in a gallery or museum, in the book, the photographs’ levels of detail are significantly reduced and some of this effect is lost. The infinite depth of field and the smoothness of the image mostly serves instead to strip the photographs of their mystery or subtext (a problem that plagues Crewdson’s work regardless of the format, albeit to a greater extent in smaller printings), tipping some photographs over into kitsch. In The Mattress (2013–14), for instance, a man stands in a misty pine forest in front of a soiled mattress lying on the dirt and covered in what appears to be red and pink flowers. Behind the man are two vintage police cars. The subjects of the photograph—the man, the mattress, the cars—appear small next to the old growth trees, the tops of which loom beyond the upper edges of the frame. The image could be lifted from a “prestige TV” police procedural. Here, everything is surface. The complete sharpness and the cool, blue-green palette of the image, alongside the genre and vintage markers and the conventional composition smack, again, of pastiche.

It's a fine line—for every instance of kitsch, Crewdson is equally capable of producing genuinely haunting photographs, sometimes within the same series. He is at his best when he eschews pre-given cinematic visual language and larger scenes, and focuses more intensely on interior spaces and individual human subjects.

The environs themselves remain haunted even when, or especially when, the human figure is absent. In “Early Work”—no doubt the most moving body of work in the book, in no small part because Crewdson had less money to work with and thus could not fully realize the doll-house style of his later work—empty interiors figure prominently. Ostensibly, because the interiors are filled with absence. If the ghosts are visible in the later series, here they are forcefully palpable because they are out of sight. In one image we see a robin’s egg blue chair, pushed back from the table ever so slightly. On the table: a pen, glasses, an empty plate, a small calendar, a note to call the doctor. In another, two suitcases and a neat pair of shiny black shoes sit in the corner of an empty room—three upholstered chairs, a coffee table, and a lamp, heavy white curtains drawn. In yet another, a single sneaker sits just beside a blanket-draped love seat, a newspaper open on the coffee table, Crewdson’s ubiquitous lamplight illuminating the room. The empty shoes, the empty plate, the empty chairs: the human figure has vanished. They haven’t simply “left the room,” they’ve disappeared: in the middle of breakfast, right before a trip—the shoes, the lighted lamps, and the accoutrements of their lives suggest that the departure was unplanned, divine. David Lynch’s influence is again apparent—but it is the quiet atmosphere of loss that predominates the early episodes of Twin Peaks rather than the Blue Velvet’s duality and artifice that comes to the fore. The stillness and planned nature of the shots make the interiors seem as if preserved in wax, a room kept exactly as is after the death of a loved one.

There can be a sociopolitical dimension to Crewdson’s work as well. In An Eclipse of Moths (2018–19), the vintage, small-town aesthetic markers remain, but, instead of signifying the “wholesome” white past as contrasted with that past’s underlying evil, the markers point to decay, to arrested development. The world is frozen, the people too—the towns, along with the cars and houses and decorations within them look old and decayed, instead of vintage. Here is Crewdson’s vision of a present clinging to nostalgia, one which both creates and reflects a motionless dead world, populated by ghosts. The backdrop of deindustrialization and the culture industry’s reliable recycling of 1950s small-town heyday of industrial capitalism nostalgia gives context to Crewdson’s otherwise drifting ghosts. There is no going back, these photographs say, and look at what it’s done to us in the present.

These two series, “Early Work” and “An Eclipse of Moths,” are Crewdson at his most uncanny. Their relative closeness to life makes their disjunction less immediately noticeable, but more disquieting in their closeness. But the uncanniness of Crewdson’s best work goes beyond subject and into formal and meta-formal levels. Images memorialize and concretize the moment, which we can return to again and again in a futile attempt to relive what has long since passed away. In Crewdson’s images, the unbounded self-love of early childhood has given way to a depressiveness bordering on catatonia. The photographic double not only serves as the harbinger of death, it is—in Crewdson’s world—the very form of death itself.