The Photographers` Gallery

Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn a part of New York in 1962. He graduated early at the John Dewey High School.

When Crewdson was a teenager he attended a punk rock group called “The Speedies”. Their song “Let Me Take Your Photo” encourage him to become a photographer in his future.

Crewdson´s photos are staged with big effort. As a result of that they are very expensive to produce. He is looking in his images for his own fear and a way out of the loneliness and the perfect photo.

In each photos Crewdson includes a whole drama story. He usually shows depressing stories from the American life. The viewer has a lot of wiggle room so that the photo can get interpreted in different ways.

The exhibition “Cathedral of the Pines“ (2013-14) is produced in the small rural town of Becket, Massachusetts and includes the surrounding forest as well as the hiking trail which is the reason for its title. This exhibition is different from Crewdsons previous work because it explores the human figure within more naturalistic environments than discussing the suburban subjects. This project is Crewdsons ´most personal´ work as he said because the forest setting reminds him of his childhood.

To produce his work he cooperated with a large crew. His work is situated between Hollywood cinema and nineteenth-century American and European Romantic landscape painting.

In his scenes he broach the issue of human´s connection and separation just as intimacy and isolation.

The following pictures of the exhibition “Cathedral of the Pines“ affected me the most. 

This image shows an old men laying in a bed and a young boy sitting next to him.
I think this is a very expressive photograph because it is unsure if the man is already dead or sick. The tablets next to him lead to the conclusion that he was/is sick for a longer time. At the same time there is the boy which looks sad and lonely but does not look at his father or hold his hand. There is a distance and isolation between them.The boy is the only reason to think that the man is not dead yet.

I also really like the scene “The basement” which shows a man in his 40s/50s sitting in an armchair and a teenaged girl laying on a sofa. Nobody is looking at the other one. The man who is probably her father is looking at a TV while the girl is staring to the other side of the room. You can not tell if they had a fight or if they are just relaxing for a minute but there is a distance between them.

Another artwork I really enjoyed looking at is the photo “Mother and daughter” which shows two women, one younger and sitting on a sofa and the other older and laying in her lap. Even they have physical contact and look familiar it seems like they are not talking and waiting until time passes by. The door in the background is open. Because of the snow and the light from the outside it seems to be cold inside of the room. There is also a quiet atmosphere.

The last photo that got me thinking was “Pickup Truck” because it led me asking myself: Why are there two nude bodies on a truck in the forest? The people look lonely. They seem to be lost in the woods and also careless about each other. The big trees block the car from driving further. But why are those people not in the truck driving back but instead sitting on its trunk? A lot of questions that I cannot answer by myself. That makes the photograph so interesting.