Gregory Crewdson: Retrospective

A master defamiliariser, Crewdson takes snapshots of everyday Americans confronted with the mysteries of mundanity. In Early Work, the photographer’s final project at Yale’s art school, he transforms real settings into uncanny, off-putting landscapes. The photos are tightly cropped, making their protagonists appear trapped in a claustrophobic prison. Hover takes a similar thematic approach. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the photographer used a crane to capture small towns from a cold, objectifying bird’s eye view.

The cinematic nature of his work reached its peak in his best-known series of photos, Twilight. With the help of a sixty-person crew, Crewdson crafted what, in his words, are “single-frame movies,” rife with references to films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the exhibit, the artist also crafted motifs that would later become the basis of his visual vocabulary—open cars, mirrors, and windows create the illusion of space and escape.

In more recent work, we see that the photographer focuses on the sociopolitical issues that ravage American small towns today. Mass unemployment, disenfranchisement, and environmental destruction jump out to us off the photos. Potholed streets and dilapidated houses symbolise an entire population that has lost its footing, and doesn’t seem to be finding it anytime soon.

Though Crewdson’s work is highly specific and personal to the context, it (often presciently) raises questions about the fabric of our larger society. Is our reality authentic, or is it merely a series of ‘single-frame movies’, already played out through images and videos that surround us at every turn? How can we keep ourselves afloat, financially and psychologically, when facing a widening void of desolation? As the environment is destroyed, how do we come to terms with ever-shrinking liveable space? In this retrospective, Crewdson shows us that photos of small towns serve not so much as documents of a rustic bygone era, but visions of a future that will soon affect us all.