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Tim Ives, the director of photography of Stranger Things, has said that the nighttime photography of Gregory Crewdson has “inspired me with its heightened reality.” Eric Messerschmidt, the DP of Mindhunter and a former assistant of Crewdson’s, has stated that the artist’s work “lives right on the edge between reality and surrealism.” A number of observers have noted that the look of Ozark can often feel like a Crewsdon photo. And Dark co-creator Jantje Friese has said that the landscape of the show was partly inspired by Crewdson’s oeuvre: “He does this photography of suburbia where you have these really wide shots where, for example, you have a person standing naked with a suitcase, and you have no idea what’s happening. It’s like mystery photography. It creates this suspense. That was actually a starting point to find the look we were searching for.”
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Crewdson, during a phone interview from his studio in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, tells The Hollywood Reporter that he largely approaches his influential work from a cinematic perspective. “I work a lot closer to a director than like a photographer. I don’t really even like physically holding the camera. I’m not one of those photographers who always has their camera in hand and in fact I’m the opposite of that. I’m much more interested in creating a world.” For much of his career, he’s been known for how elaborately he stages his photos, most depicting suburban landscapes and home interiors with a heightened sense of reality. On his shoots, Crewdson hires large production crews of 30 to 40 people, most of whom have worked in the film world, working on everything from location scouting to set design and lighting.
On Sept. 24, the artist debuted a new series of work, An Eclipse of Moths, which opened at Gagosian Beverly Hills and is on view by reserved appointment times through Nov. 21. In these 16 works — all 4-by-8 foot prints, all landscapes — the staging is much less apparent though than earlier in his career. “I intentionally made these pictures where the storylines or the underlying narratives are quieter in tone. They are really first and foremost about the place,” says Crewdson.
His new photos, which depict landscapes that feel like a portrait of small-town America in decay, were all shot in 2018 on the outskirts of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “In a certain way it feels like exactly the right time to show them, because the pictures have taken on a strange relevance with the moment we are in. They are primarily emptied-out streets and scenes of brokenness and dislocation and a certain sort of want for redemption or transcendence,” says Crewdson, who is also director of graduate studies in photography at Yale, where these days he is teaching remotely.
His Gagosian show debuted without an opening-night event and marked the first time he’s mounted a show of his work without attending in person. The limitations on visitors to the gallery, he believes though, will actually make for “a really nice way of looking at the work — in an empty gallery. There’s something about the pictures that are already about a sense of isolation and dislocation. I think that will be a great way of seeing these large-scale pictures, in an emptied-out space. I’m hopeful that as many people as possible get to actually see the prints in the gallery. There is something about the presence of the physical object of a photograph hanging on a wall that feels very different. I feel similar I’m sure to a lot of filmmakers who feel the right context for their film is in a movie theater as opposed to streaming.”
One of the most emblematic images in An Eclipse of Moths is the piece “Redemption Center.” “It’s key to the body of work,” says Crewdson. “We’re looking out into a sort of emptied-out parking lot and there’s a redemption center where people return [cans and bottles for] deposits. It’s underneath a lamp post and there’s a lone man. He has a carton of empty bottles. There’s a puddle he’s looking at that has elements of what look like rose petals. There’s obviously the play on redemption. There’s the use of the lamppost, which is a motif throughout all the pictures and of shining a light onto these lone figures. I think it really captures the mood of all the pictures.”
Another work, “Funerary Back Lot,” was shot on a location Crewdson found where “a man casts burial vaults which are the things that coffins are lowered into. It was at the edge of this trailer park and I thought this was such an evocative location for a picture. There’s a teenage couple, this teenage boy is sitting on these cement steps and there’s who might be his girlfriend bathing in one of the burial vaults filled with rainwater. And there’s all this funerary debris including gravestones stacked on the ground. It’s evocative of youth and love and mortality.”
And while it’s true that the amount of production that went into each of these new photos is not as apparent as in prior pieces, Crewdson details just how much went on behind the scenes to capture them. “We worked very closely with the city [of Pittsfield] and they closed down streets for us and they gave us permission to change the light bulbs in the lampposts and we changed street signs and we asked them not to pave on certain streets and not mow certain lawns. We wanted all these locations to feel outside of time in a certain way. And we used fog machines and we wet down the streets. We bring in our own prop cars; I love nondescript ’70s and ’80s cars which are really hard to find. It’s all to create this world.”
Lighting is a particular preoccupation, something Crewdson works closely on with his director of photography Rick Sands. “We have lights that are in cranes looking down on the street. We have lights in different storefronts. We have lights in the cars, and then because the streetlamp is so pivotal to the pictures, we worked with the city here. They turned off all the streetlamps on the location and then we put our on light sources in. We wanted to control it in terms of the color, temperature and just the level of the light. We wanted it to feel like a beacon, a light source that feels just exactly right.”
The title of the new show, he adds, “is actually a term like a murder of crows. It references moths being attracted to a light source. It’s a metaphor for these lone figures passing through empty streets and drawn to these lampposts.”
Crewdson, who grew up in New York City, has long loved movies. “I’ve been inspired by movies and then I’ve made my pictures and then in turn others are influenced by my pictures. It goes both ways. My big influences were all filmmakers, primarily as I was coming of age like obviously Blue Velvet but also Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Night of the Hunter and Badlands. There’s an endless list of films that hugely shaped me,” says the photographer. His work has included working with celebrities as well. His series Dream House, shot in the early 2000s, featured the likes of Tilda Swinton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman placed in suburban dreamscapes. In recent months, during stay-at-home orders around the country, Crewdson also launched the Yale Photo Pop-Up Lecture Series, a video conversation series in which he speaks with fellow creatives, including Russian Doll’s Natasha Lyonne, directors Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) and Ari Aster (Midsommer), and Cate Blanchett.
Crewdson also tells THR that he’s looking to make a film himself someday. “We’ve had a longterm idea of actually under the right circumstances making some kind of movie,” says the photographer, adding, “As a photographer I really think in terms of still images. It’s a narrative form that has no before or after. It’s a frozen moment in time. My first and foremost intention is to try and make these very ordinary and everyday situations look beautiful and mysterious and evocative. At the same time, I’ve always loved movies. I love the way movies look, I love how light looks on screen and I love production values. So from early on I was interested in taking some of the production value — lighting, special effects, props — and installing them into a single image.”
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