Crewdson’s creepy views of American Life

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In a Lonely Place: Gregory Crewdson

By Gregory Crewdson

This book of Gregory Crewdson’s photographs takes its title from the 1950 film directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart as the screenwriter Dixon Steele.  In a Lonely Place, the film noir title, refers to the condition of the screenwriter-artist persona of the  Steele character but also indicates a preference for the ideal location of a crime. Crewdson, a professor of photography at Yale University, is among the most prominent of contemporary photographers, and is an adept at producing a particularly greasy, creepy view of the inherent criminality of American life. 

In a Lonely Placegathers photographs from three quite distinct series.  The 55 photographs assembled here are prefaced by Crewdson’s own frank and revealing essay in which he illustrates and explains the formation of his photographic impulses through the cinematic work of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson, the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the photography of Lee Friedlander, Joel Sternfeld, Cindy Sherman, Larry Sultan, and William Eggleston.  These early and continuing influences are richly evoked throughout the book, but especially in the first of the three series of works.

‘Beneath the Roses’, the first series here, contains 20 plates, produced between 2003 and 2008. All but four of them are exterior shots and all but one contain at least one human figure.  Most visible throughout is the homage that all the interior shots, and many of the exterior ones, pay to Hopper’s paintings and to David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet. These photographs are at once attractive and difficult.  Their saturated colors combine with the utterly blank look of the human beings pinned rather carelessly here and there in each of them. That there are human beings at all here is surprising given the absence of human affect; this produces a peculiar kind of menace. 

These photographs seem to promise something important that needs deciphering while at the same time entirely withholding any access to it by the viewer.  There’s a load of menace here, but it’s a menace so impersonal as to be at once entirely theatrical yet somehow nevertheless unnerving.  The cinematic look and reference of the photographs help reveal the extent to which Hopper’s paintings were themselves already thoroughly cinematic. It’s as if Crewdson’s subject is really the condition of American vision, that is, the manner in which our vision has become so encrusted with the look and feel of cinema while our lives have ben hollowed out by their contents and narratives. 

And so Crewdson’s premise in this series especially is that just as we see the extent to which our insides have been scrubbed clean by projected coloured light, so too do we see our having become overstuffed with a surfeit of images. Thus we come to inhabit, despite ourselves, their correspondingly empty, yet suffocating points of view. It appears in Crewdson’s work that can we entirely wash ourselves free of none of this. The domestic apocalypse so craftily constructed here owes a debt to the randomly catastrophic photographs of William Eggleston.

The book’s second series of photographs is titled ‘Sanctuary’and dates from 2009, when Crewdson visited Rome’s Cinecittà studios and shot a series of exterior black-and-white photographs of the abandoned film studio lot.   The 21 plates of ‘Sanctuary’are unpopulated except for the final photograph, which contains a single figure in the glass-enclosed booth at the street entrance to the studio. 

The photographs in this series are located somewhere beyond the forlorn.  They are pictures of abandonment, of buildings and streets that were themselves built to provide but the flimsiest architecture for the presentation and illusion of human life, but of course never intended for human habitation and use.  They provide a deeply melancholy revelation of the emptiness of human effort to get a glimpse of itself cinematically. 

The images are most melancholic when their backgrounds show a glimpse of a suburban apartment building or two behind the empty movie sets.  This feature is the most disconcerting aspect of these photographs, for here we are forced to acknowledge that somehow the decaying film lot facades and empty streets speak to us insofar as they promise more than the suburban apartment buildings.  That is, however illusory the film sets, these sets body forth the humanity of retaining hope for some meaning and substance, whereas the apartment buildings begin with the premise of having abandoned all hope.  There is then a very neat reversal of abandonment on display here: it is not so much we who have abandoned the fantasy world that cinema once nourished, but rather it is our dream factories that have abandoned us to the sterility and homogeneity of contemporary life.

The final series of 14 plates dates from 1996 and is titled ‘Fireflies’. The black-and-white photographs were made outdoors at night in rural Massachusetts; the eponymous title is in fact deceptive.  We see no fireflies but only the smudges, dots, and smears of light that indicate their having once made manifest – as light – their desire to mate.  It’s the very simplicity of the premise of this series, almost childlike, which makes its implications all the more haunting, for how can we not acknowledge – in light of the images of the fireflies – the transience and ephemerality of the light of our own desires and appearances. 

In a Lonely Place: Gregory Crewdson by Gregory Crewdson  is published by Abrams 2011. 160 pp. 70 illus, $40.00. ISBN 978-1-4197-0110-8