Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
"These are the most personal pictures I have made. The theme is the search for some kind of connection in the world, some sort of intimacy." —Gregory Crewdson CULTURED 243 Seated in a drafty old Methodist church on a bright fall day in the Berkshires, Gregory Crewdson could almost be the subject of one of his own photographs. There are copious indirect light sources, casting the perfect amount of illumination on him and the 19th-century woodwork and original windows of his chapel-turned-home, which surrounds him. Crewdson, 53, is opening up about his powerful new series—shockingly, his first in five years—but there's something formal in the air, too. It's exactly the dynamic that has always powered his work and has led him to the front rank of contemporary artists, and to the directorship of graduate studies in photography at Yale. "All my pictures thrive on distance and intimacy, those things working together," says Crewdson. "It's not that dissimilar to what my father did as a psychiatrist. There's always a chilly remove. I think that's in every picture." But with his new series Cathedral of the Pines, debuting in January at Gagosian Gallery's mammoth 21st Street space in Manhattan, Crewdson is going deeper, using friends and family in some pictures (a rare departure), making smaller-scale prints than usual—and generally honing his famed psychological acuity. As always, the pictures don't really lend themselves to description. In one image, a woman is standing at the sink looking toward the window in early morning light, with a faint echo of Edward Hopper; in another, two stock-still figures are seen at a far distance, standing by a river, framed by the arch of a bridge's base. But in their stillness and utter clarity, they rivet the viewer. "The tension is quieter, more evocative and less literal," says Crewdson of Pines. He adds, "These are the most personal pictures I have made. The theme is the search for some kind of connection in the world, the search for intimacy." And he says the series is more like painting than film, which is a particularly significant shift. As usual, the images were shot in a town not far from where he is sitting. "I love being here, I feel connected to the world," he says of western Massachusetts, where his unusual home has an adjacent studio next door. But getting to this new series took him on quite a journey–in all senses. Crewdson is a Park Slope native who was exposed to photography greats early on. "Diane Arbus was my first big influence," he recalls. He studied at SUNY Purchase in the 1980s, with the good fortune to have Laurie Simmons as a photography teacher. "Obviously, Hitchcock was a major influence," says Crewdson, who has been able to mine tension and menace in the vein of the great director. He cites Shadow of a Doubt (1943) as a touchstone, for its use of a small town as a moody Mother and Daughter, 2014