Unreal stills, unmoving imagesArt and Design
Photographer Gregory Crewdson at The Centre for Contemporary Photography in Fitzroy. Photo: Joe Armao
IN A LONELY PLACE
Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), 404 George Street, Fitzroy
Until November 11
IN SUBDUED archival-looking black-and-white photographs, the streets of Rome are deserted and crumbling. Aesthetically, they glow in their disrepair, with a dim light enhancing their venerable stones.
Just as you're settling into the sombre mood of Gregory Crewdson's evocative Sanctuary from 2009, you're surprised to find that it's all ticky-tacky, not a genuine concourse but a movie set with scaffolding.
This forum of fibs is an ingenious concept: a fascist Italian recreation of ruins that is now fragile and decaying. It's as if the simulacrum of an ancient world shares the same destiny of decrepitude that it caught from the original.
Crewdson's blockbuster at the CCP is about the world as a stage or set. The most self-consciously theatrical series is Beneath the roses of 2003-08. The famous pictures are large and pin-sharp, created with a large-format camera and a big crew of technicians and actors. The monumental works are meticulously composed and sometimes recall American painters like Edward Hopper and the photorealist Richard Estes in their mysterious stasis.
In painting, if you want to make something look brighter or mistier or on fire, you just toss in appropriate colours while building your volumes and edges. But in photography, you have to bring in lights and fog machines and incendiaries; and even then, the effects often look phoney. Crewdson is a master of directorial fakery, creating memorably unnatural-looking photographs that seem wilfully inauthentic.
I wish I could say the images are atmospheric. But the pictures are stilted and airless. You feel that if the wind were to blow, it would only be because someone was instructed to plug in a fan.
The human subjects in Beneath the roses strike me as lifeless, perhaps because of long exposures, during which everyone is ordered to stand still. The scenes mostly have a tragic air with incomplete narratives; but because of the contrived lighting, atmosphere and paralytic acting, they're enigmatic in a goofy way. By suggesting some profound condition which is only staged as artifice, the work unwittingly strays into the burlesque.
Crewdson's dramas seem both obvious and obscure. If you only saw one, you'd think it's very clever and symbolically meaningful. But seeing a dozen weakens the intrigue, because the action in one picture looks more arbitrary than in the last.
Some works are illustrative, like the dinner where two guests haven't arrived and the two at table are depressed. So too when a young woman comes home in nightie holding clothes, while her boyfriend remains in the taxi. What's the incentive to imagine what she's thinking? I cannot suspend my disbelief and suspect the drama of being gratuitous.
A naked baby and mum in a snowed-in house, telephone to hand, make a pass at allegory but without a symbolic rationale. A boy gazing up at a bridge with faux fog: why and who cares?
It could all be interpreted as an allegory of post-industrial America which has lost its manufacturing vigour. So rail tracks and silos with ambling lovers express an aimless society, as with a man pushing a shopping trolley in the street, a bunch of young people showing scant interest in a burning house by a disused railway, or a young woman who makes a steak for a glum granddad.
Sadly, if you put bored people in a photograph, the picture ends up looks boring. Even if it seeks some immanence, Crewdson's images scramble for a rationale, they're stories without a narrative.
Crewdson has massive impact; but the famous works with actors are less convincing than the more recent Roman work, whose subject matter - tellingly - is a theatrical shell that is now dead.