Gregory Crewdson

Why the Still Image

Crewdson studied photography at SUNY Purchase and later received his MFA from the Yale School of Art.^*4 He has explained that, because he is dyslexic, still images suited the way he thinks more closely than the linear progression of film or literature.^*17 Deeply drawn to photography’s stillness, he chose to concentrate elements of filmmaking within a single image even as cinema remained a major influence.^*18 The cinematic appearance of his photographs grows from this decision to use film-production techniques in order to think through the still image.

The Rise of Staged Photography

Crewdson began working in the late 1980s and 1990s, when staged scenes, quotation, and fiction had become established within museum photography without relying on photography’s presumed truthfulness. The Met’s Reality Check addresses the boundary between truth and fiction in contemporary photography and places Crewdson within this development.^*5 From the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman borrowed the format of the film still to perform female characters from movies that did not exist.^*21 Jeff Wall developed the “cinematographic photograph,” staging and restaging scenes to create self-contained tableaux distinct from documentary and street photography.^*20 Working after these precedents, Crewdson developed an approach in which suburbia itself became a constructed photographic set.

Freezing Cinema into a Single Image

Crewdson has described photography’s narrative capacity as limited compared with film or literature, calling the photograph “frozen and mute” in time.^*16 He treats that limitation as the basis of the work, compressing information into a single moment and leaving questions in place of answers.^*16 For this reason, large sets and production crews do not build a completed film-like plot. They allow a dense field of clues to occupy one image without letting any single clue determine what has happened.

Beneath the Roses involved closing roads, constructing buildings and interiors, positioning actors, and combining multiple lighting setups. Gagosian describes the series through its film-like production complexity and exacting control of detail.^*1 White Cube’s exhibition materials likewise show location scouting, set construction, lighting, and post-production compositing all directed toward a single finished image.^*8 The film-like production process ultimately produces a photograph with no “next shot.”

Light in Place of Narrative

In a Whitney audio guide, Crewdson states that light is central to his work and that he tries to tell the story through illumination.^*16 In Twilight, artificial light falls across suburban night scenes, cars, windows, gardens, and figures, giving ordinary places a brightness slightly beyond the everyday. The Frist Art Museum describes the series as scenes in which inexplicable events enter domestic surroundings.^*7 The light does not explain what has happened. It determines where attention gathers and which parts of the scene take on an unnatural importance.

In Beneath the Roses, light from windows, streetlamps, car headlights, and interiors competes within the same frame. The Whitney’s Untitled, 2004 is a representative example in which figures, architecture, and road lighting are distributed across a single tableau.^*6 Lighting functions as a clue that prompts the viewer to imagine time before and after the still image; its role is narrative, not merely atmospheric.

Why Suburbia Became the Stage

American suburbia had been a photographic subject well before Crewdson. The Hofstra University Museum places Dan Weiner in the 1950s, Bill Owens in the 1960s and 1970s, and Crewdson from the 1990s onward within a cultural history of how suburban life, distinct from both city and countryside, has been represented.^*23 Weiner and Owens documented existing suburban life; Crewdson stages similar houses, lawns, roads, and domestic interiors for the camera, introducing fictional events into places that retain the appearance of reality.

In a 1997 BOMB conversation, Crewdson said he was interested in tensions between “the domestic and nature,” “the normal and the abnormal,” “the artificial and the real,” and “the familiar and the mysterious,” linking these oppositions to the uncanny.^*19 Suburban houses and lawns therefore function as familiar types associated with everyday life and domestic stability, not as neutral backgrounds for an invented strange world. White Cube also describes the figures in Beneath the Roses as embodiments of “middle-class American alienation,” treating ordinary interiors and streets as stages for unease.^*8

John Garrison and Philip Krejcarek analyze Twilight as a structure in which fulfillment and erotic life are excluded from suburban and small-town domesticity, leaving the figures with a desire to escape outward.^*24 Their study also interprets light entering from beyond the frame as connecting the desire for an “outside” with the photographer’s gaze. Suburbia gave Crewdson a setting in which established images of home, safety, and ordinary life could occupy the same frame as isolation and desire.

A Turn Toward Smaller Productions

In Sanctuary, Crewdson photographed the Cinecittà film studios outside Rome in unpopulated black-and-white images, temporarily stepping away from large crews and suburban locations.^*9 Cathedral of the Pines was produced over three shoots in 2013–14 around Becket, Massachusetts, using forests and interiors to address tensions between connection and separation, intimacy and isolation.^*26 Even as the production environment changed, the suspended scenes, directional light, and tension between interiors and nature remained. The figures’ actions still resist a single explanation, and the missing before and after continues to structure the image.

Twilight

Twilight, produced from about 1998 to 2002, was the series that brought broad attention to Crewdson’s cinematic staging. The Frist Art Museum presents it as a body of work in which surreal events enter ordinary suburban life.^*7 Holes in lawns, inexplicable light, and half-clothed bodies occupy the same frames as ordinary family life, while the figures’ actions are given no clear cause. The series established a structure in which the look of a film scene is paired with the absence of visible causes and consequences.

Beneath the Roses

Beneath the Roses, produced from roughly 2003 to 2008, combined location shooting, set construction, actors, lighting, and post-production digital processing.^*8 In works held by the Whitney, roads, houses, figures, and several light sources are dispersed across wide compositions so that no single element determines the narrative.^*6 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, also holds works from the series.^*14 The ALBERTINA online collection likewise presents a 2004 Untitled as part of Beneath the Roses.^*15

Cathedral of the Pines

Cathedral of the Pines is a 31-image series made in 2013–14 in forests and interiors around Becket. Crewdson has said that working there restored his connection to making photographs and marked a period of renewal.^*26 Gagosian describes the series as placing figures in ambiguous scenes where intimacy and isolation, connection and separation intersect.^*26 Photomonitor discusses the series through its relationship to pictorial tableaux and landscape painting as well as the lineage of the film still.^*22

The Later Trilogy

An Eclipse of Moths uses the postindustrial streets around Pittsfield, Massachusetts, as its setting, photographing closed stores, parking lots, roads, and isolated figures. Gagosian links traces of economic decline to the isolation of the people within these scenes.^*10 In the subsequent Eveningside, Crewdson shifted to black and white, composing streets and storefronts in the same region under light close to the boundary between day and night. The Taubman Museum treats Cathedral of the Pines, An Eclipse of Moths, and Eveningside as a continuous trilogy.^*11

After Sherman and Wall

Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall are important points of comparison for Crewdson’s historical position. In Untitled Film Stills, Sherman performed roles from nonexistent movies, using photography to examine how familiar images of women are constructed.^*21 Wall staged and restaged scenes while establishing each photograph as an independent tableau.^*20 Crewdson differs from both in bringing the division of labor and lighting systems of film production into suburban locations and concentrating those resources into one suspended moment.

Cinematic or Pictorial?

Crewdson is frequently described as “cinematic,” but the term alone does not explain how his pictures work. He has said that although he loves film, he cannot make a linear movie and is drawn instead to suggesting a story within one image.^*18 Photomonitor discusses Cathedral of the Pines in relation to the history of pictorial tableaux and landscape painting as much as to the film still.^*22 Gagosian cites references including Hopper, Hitchcock, and Lynch, yet the stopped time of the finished work remains a decisive difference from cinema.^*1

Crewdson’s relationship to film lies in the structure of the photographs as much as in their references. Crewdson’s images contain a cinematic density of information, but because they withhold what comes before and after the event, more information makes causes and consequences harder to settle. Smithsonian interview material also records his long-running effort to articulate both his production process and photography’s narrative capacity.^*13

The Repetition of Suburbia

Long-term assessments of Crewdson have also criticized his repeated use of the same suburbia, isolated figures, and uneasy light. Reviewing Beneath the Roses in 2005, Vince Aletti argued that the enormous production scale and cinematic artifice were becoming ends in themselves, and that recurring themes of “alienation,” “isolation,” and “existential anxiety” approached self-imitation.^*25 The criticism identifies technical perfection itself as a potential weakness in the work.

SITE SANTA FE placed the transformation of ordinary places into psychologically tense environments at the center of its presentation of Crewdson’s work.^*3 Later, Sanctuary removed human figures; Cathedral of the Pines narrowed production to private forests and interiors; and Eveningside shifted to a postindustrial town in black and white.^*12 Across these changes of setting and production scale, the missing before and after, deliberately designed light, and disjunction between figures and environments remain consistent. Crewdson has also been involved in photography education at Yale for many years and currently directs its graduate photography program.^*2 Throughout the work, multiple narrative clues occupy the still image while the events before and after remain undetermined.