Beginning in the mid-1980s, photographer Gregory Crewdson embarked on an exploration of the suburban and rural United States, those furthest away from metropolitan turmoil as well as the illusion of victory and individual initiative at the basis of the American dream.
His works take shape within the staged photography, a genre in which the story is entrusted to an elaborate staging, made up of metaphors and allusions. Crewdson, born in New York in 1962, does not have the soul of a photojournalist who observes reality in the streets and the next moment immortalizes it in his camera. His method is more similar to that of a film director: each series he makes is preceded by long inspections, the drafting of a storyboard, the choice of models and models; alongside him works a real crew with a director of photography, and there is also room for cranes and large format cameras. “I’m not comfortable holding a camera,” he told The New York Times a couple of years ago, “I’m more interested in what I see in front of me.”
In terms of themes and atmospheres, his works have been combined with films such as Velluto blu, Close encounters of the third kind, Vertigo e Death runs on the rivereven if the fundamental inspiration remains the work of Edward Hopper, the painter who first of all staged loneliness in the United States of the twentieth century.
In 2012, he left behind a failed marriage, New York, borrowed models from Hollywood (such as Julianne Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow) and moved to Massachusetts, where he began working on more personal projects. He settled in Becket, a small town where he went on vacation as a child, living in the midst of nature and in a deconsecrated Methodist church, where he found the beauty he needed to leave again.
Thus it was born Cathedral of the pines, which is the name of a road he stumbled upon on his long hikes in the area, working with a small crew and being mesmerized by the natural light of the forest. In Cathedralconcluded in 2014, we find people who, despite their apparent loneliness, are looking for a cure, a new place to take refuge and connect to something or someone.
With the next An eclipse of moths (2018-2019) Crewdson moved to Pittsfield, also in Massachusetts, a city heavily hit by the economic crisis and opioid addiction. In the despair of the moths (moth) attracted but confused by the electric lights, deprived of their reference points, saw a metaphor for the defeat of Pittsfield herself. “Unfortunately it wasn’t difficult to find sad and depressed extras. It was not necessary to turn to professional actors or models, and in any case I would not have wanted to use them, ”she said.
Cathedral of the pines e An eclipse of moths are part of a trilogy concluded by Eveningside, commissioned in part by Intesa Sanpaolo for Gallerie d’Italia in Turin. This latest project focuses on the contemplation of everyday life and workplaces, inhabited by characters who seem to question their existential condition through the reflection of a mirror or in a shop window. For the first time, the photographer has chosen black and white, a tribute to classic cinema and the gothic imaginary. Eveningside it is not a precise place, but the result of a composite geography, recreated by the union of some towns of New England that Crewdson had already photographed.
All the pieces of this trilogy arrive at the Turin Galleries, located on a long solitary road on which the author has brought his existential and political research to find familiar spaces and trace the desolation of America today. However, the first series we see in the exhibition, curated by Jean-Charles Vergne and open until January 22, takes a break: it is Fireflies, which Crewdson does on his own, without staging or post-production, and where he focuses on the poetic and minimalist observation of fireflies at dusk. As Vergne tells us, Fireflies it represents an unexpected gesture, perhaps too intimate, that the photographer has left in the drawer for ten years. In reality it introduces the viewer well to the contemplation of nature which is the basis of Crewdson’s work, revealing its metaphysical substance.