Review: Gregory Crewdson: Cathedral of the Pines

 Cathedral of the Pines is really quite something. Exploring Gregory Crewdson's mysterious and deeply narrative body of work, this is the collection's first UK exhibition.

 The Photographers' Gallery - Cathedral of the Pines' current home - say:

With this series, produced between 2013 and 2014, Crewdson departs from his interest in uncanny suburban subjects and explores human relations within more natural environments. In images that recall nineteenth-century American and European paintings, Crewdson photographs figures posing within the small rural town of Becket, Massachusetts, and its vast surrounding forests, including the actual trail from which the series takes its title. Interior scenes charged with ambiguous narratives probe tensions between human connection and separation, intimacy and isolation.

Crewdson describes this project as ‘his most personal’, venturing to retrieve in the remote setting of the forest, a reminiscence of his childhood. The images in Cathedral of the Pines, located in the dystopian landscape of the anxious American imagination, create atmospheric scenes, many featuring local residents, and for the first time in Crewdson’s work, friends and family. In Woman at Sink, a woman pauses from her domestic chores, lost in thought. In Pickup Truck, Crewdson shows a nude couple in the flatbed of a truck in a dense forest—the woman seated, the man turned away in repose. Crewdson situates his disconsolate subjects in familiar settings, yet their cryptic actions—standing still in the snow, or nude on a riverbank—hint at invisible challenges. Precisely what these challenges are, and what fate awaits these anonymous figures, are left to the viewer's imagination.

Crewdson's careful crafting of visual suspense conjures forebears such as Diane Arbus, Alfred Hitchcock, and Edward Hopper, as well as the influence of Hollywood cinema and directors such as David Lynch. In Cathedral of the Pines, Crewdson's persistent psychological leitmotifs evolve into intimate figurative dramas.

Visually alluring and often deeply disquieting, these tableaux are the result of an intricate production process: For more than twenty years, Crewdson has used the streets and interiors of small-town America as settings for photographic incarnations of the uncanny. Working with a large crew, he plans his images as meticulously as any movie director.

The results of this intricate process are spectacular.

The links made between Crewdson's work and Twin Peaks seem wholly justified when you arrive amongst huge photographs of small-town America, populated with strangely disconnected people. The images have stories that beg to be told, and everything about them is otherworldly and beguiling. I was completely mesmerised by them.

The technical side of the photography is equally impressive. The amount of work Gregory Crewdson puts into staging the shots is absolutely immense - they are cinematic in scale as has already been pointed out - and the slide show of 'behind-the-scenes' photographs is illuminating as to exactly how much effort is required for the images to be created.

The exhibition as a whole thing is well-curated, and the body of work sits nicely across the three floors of the space. The Photographers' Gallery is a venue I cannot praise highly enough for not only the quality of their exhibitions, but also the gallery as a whole - it's welcoming, the cafe is good and shop ruinously well-stocked.

As someone with an active interest in photography I engaged with Cathedral of the Pines on the levels of both story and technique; these contrasting elements are equally captivating. However, even if you're not a regular photographer yourself, there is a lot to work with in this exhibition: I recommend it highly. Go get yourself lost.

5/5: It's strange and it's beautiful
The Photographer's Gallery
Soho
Until 8th October 2017