In creating each of his images, Crewdson writes what amounts to a screenplay with his partner,. Each piece is meticulously planned with a team of production designer–like assistants, achieving a cinematic patina that can evoke the nostalgic inner monologues of Edward Hopper’s paintings, all while challenging American audiences to reflect upon our nation’s thorniest issues.
In this particular series, each portrait was created in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a suburban landscape on the outskirts of a run-down industrial city. “It’s about 45 minutes from my home,” says Crewdson. “Melville wrotein Pittsfield, actually. Edith Wharton and [Nathaniel] Hawthorne lived in the area. That’s not directly important to the work, but I like building on certain traditions.” Crewdson admits he is inspired by the work of Norman Rockwell, an artist who worked in a neighboring town.
The empty streets and tired civilians in the photographer’s work bear an eerie similarity to America during the pandemic. However, the series was made in 2018. “I could never have predicted that the pictures would take on this meaning. I was very aware of, while I was making them, of certain themes of brokenness, dislocation, and alienation. All the pictures are these vast landscape images with lone figures wandering through them.
The opioid addiction plaguing many rural American towns is hauntingly present in this collection, and Crewdson was confronted with the crisis first-hand when scouting locations. “I came upon several overdoses,” he says. But while the photographer is acknowledging this pressing pain, he is also looking forward: “I want there to be a sense of hope, or redemption, or connection, possibility.”© Gregory Crewdson. Courtesy Gagosian.
While the show’s virtual tour is groundbreaking for the art world in a pandemic, Crewdson is also wrestling with photography in a time of perpetual screen time: “Ninety-nine percent of all of us experience photographs through social media. It’s an interesting challenge to maintain the idea that a photograph—physical, on a wall—has a prominence and a permanence unlike how we experience almost all of our pictures, today….
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