Into the woods
A new exhibition shows photographer Gregory Crewdson mixing grit with his customary gloss
Gregory Crewdson loves a suicidal housewife. He loves a domestic disturbance. He loves a lonely figure awake at night, naked. He loves a mysterious misty light creeping from behind a bridge, or between trees, or through an open door, or fading on a horizon. His photos, usually blown up into gargantuan prints, explore the unheimlich in small-town USA; his frozen, cinematic tableaux radiate recent or imminent violence.
His new show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery, Cathedral of the Pines, consists of 31 images shot between 2013–’14 around the town of Becket, Massachusetts and while his themes — and movie-scale production values — are unmistakable, the series is more muted, less kitsch. Instead of rayon sheets in motels, or overturned school buses, or houses in flames, there are dark cabins, woodland clearings, and brown rivers flowing under stone bridges.
The series arrived after a five-year work hiatus for Brooklyn-born Crewdson, not unrelated to the breakdown of his marriage, and came to him while cross-country skiing near his home in the Berkshires, along the hiking trail from which the show gets its name. The new photos, he has said, are about a search for intimacy, and “the tension is quieter, more evocative, less literal”. The prints are slightly smaller than usual, but the air of psychological disquiet, of which Crewdson is king, is more potent than ever.
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Gregory Crewdson: Cathedral of the Pines, The Photographers’ Gallery, Ramillies Street, London W1; 23 June–8 October;