What better obsession than perfection, the ever unattainable muse whose mystery lies in its unattainable grace. Many are called, but few will devote their lives to pursue its exacting demands. Those who do understand the journey and destination are inextricably intertwined, the truth lying beneath the hypnotic power of beauty itself.
For Gregory Crewdson, “every photographer has one story to tell” – his being a search for the elusive that exists somewhere between the waking and dreaming worlds. Here the photograph embodies paradox, occupying the liminal space between fiction and fact. The story is distilled to a single frame liberated from the vestiges of time and the tyranny of words, becoming a hypnotic meditation on the implicit tensions and desires hiding in plain sight.
Over the past four decades, Crewdson has crafted grand scenes of American life set amidst the natural splendor of the New England landscape that deftly blend elements of auteur cinema, staged photography, old master painting, and mid-20th century realism with singular aplomb. Each large-scale image is conceived and executed as a small film production, prepared months in advance with the participation of dozens of specialists, the process as spellbinding as the photographs themselves.
With the new exhibition and catalogue, Gregory Crewdson, curator and editor Walter Moses seamlessly weaves the artist’s first career retrospective. The catalogue features more than 300 photographs from nine groups of work as well as previously unseen Production Stills made between 1991–2022, which provides readers with a behind-the-scenes look at Crewdson’s highly elaborate process to craft a perfect world through hyper-realistic detail.
“One Story to Tell”
Conceived serially, Gregory Crewdson charts the artist’s formal and conceptual explorations since the mid-1980s, creating an intricate map of irrational passions, desires, and fears lurking beneath the surface of our everyday lives.
Like filmmakers David Lynch, Stephen Spielberg, and David Fincher, Crewdson is deeply attuned to the magical theatricality of our waking lives, its ever-present yet elusive nature a dragon to be chased and distilled into the single image. Stripped of motion, sound, and dialogue it is a story that unfolds in light and shadow alone.
Although the scenes are staged, they are filled with an emotional intensity that radiates from the page. Here nothing is quite what it seems. The result is uncanny, like a Rorschach test, inviting infinite interpretations of the work. Here is the American psyche laid bare; the pursuit of happiness crafting a landscape of hope and despair, intimacy and distance, connection and loss.
Like a dream, there is a knowing that exists beyond words that defies our compulsion to define, label, and pin down. Instead Crewdson’s photographs question, reflect, and reveal a truth that is neither fact nor fiction but an amalgamation of both.
Gregory Crewdson, is on view through September 8, 2024, at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. The catalogue is published by Prestel, $60.
