A pioneer of large-scale photography, Gregory Crewdson has been developing a unique photographic language over the last thirty years. Each shot is the result of a lengthy pre-production process involving storyboards, actors, set building, technicians, special effects and sophisticated lighting.

The Eveningside exhibition was held this summer as part of a retrospective at the Arles Rencontres de la Photographie event. Gregory Crewdson uses it to push the boundary between reality and fiction even further. He invents ambiguous suburban landscapes where the motionlessness of the characters, frozen in the most ordinary of daily activities, is both fascinating and disquieting.

A fictional portrait of an America in an unidentifiable era, the scenes depict solitary figures, often captured through a complex interplay of mirrors, storefronts or places of transition: bridges, porches, mini-markets and hardware stores. His black-and-white palette draws skilfully on a series of special effects – fog, smoke and rain – to create atmospheres as melancholy as they are gothic, bringing to mind classical cinema, film noir and the realism of Edward Hopper’s paintings.

Gregory Crewdson’s work oscillates between the vulnerability of the human condition and the paradoxes of the American dream. The complexity of the monochrome tones and their strange beauty offer a powerful metaphor for the unendurable limits of our hyper-connected world, digital and blinded. Crewdson is never didactic, leaving the viewer free to imagine the stories hidden beneath the surface and dream of other possibilities.