Photographer Gregory Crewdson and his eerie rooms of gloom

Carefully staged, the American photographer’s film-like scenarios in Cathedral of the Pines depict pensive women in banal yet strangely uncanny scenarios

“One great thing about photography is that it kind of hovers between everything. It’s really easy to reach out to other mediums and have connections between things,” says Gregory Crewdson. In the American photographer’s series Cathedral of the Pines, currently on view at both the Paris and Brussels outposts of Galerie Templon, and heading to the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2017, the evident overlap is with film: it was shot on an extensive production schedule over two summers and one winter in western Massachusetts. As with Crewdson’s previous series, such as Twilight or Beneath the Roses, his creative purview encompasses careful staging with a sizable crew, who attend to location scouting, set lighting, casting, makeup, props and storyboards.

“I have images in my head,” he says of his elaborate modus operandi. “The only way I know how to make them into pictures is this one. I’m sure there’s easier ways to do it … I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else.” He laughs. “There is this paradox, where I depend on this large group to create pictures that feel specifically mine.” Having worked with the same core group for 15 years, he says: “There’s a shorthand in terms of what the overall ambition is, and what the outcome is going to be.” And having gone through film-like motions all these years, Crewdson will finally, in the near future, be venturing into “Hollywood-style” directing of an original screenplay.

There is also an overlap between Crewdson’s photography and the medium of painting. Years before realizing his own series, he saw a 19th-century-focused group show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Rooms with a View, featuring resonant motifs of domestic spaces and outside luminosity. “The window is a metaphor for unfulfilled longing,” the exhibition description notes – which could just as easily apply to Crewdson’s series.

“The ambience of that show really did have an effect,” he muses. “When we were making the pictures, I was very conscious of the relationship between interior and exterior space, and using a lighting style where the light coming from outside was the narrative light.” He adds: “I wanted the production value to be quiet and intimate and subtle.”

The title of Cathedral of the Pines stuck before a single picture had even been brainstormed, let alone taken. The series is named after a rural trail near Crewdson’s home in Massachusetts, a converted Methodist church and firehouse which he shares with his creative and life partner, Juliane Hiam. (He also spends time in Connecticut, where he’s director of graduate studies in photography at Yale.) The trail sign sparked an “aesthetic awakening” after an extended period of creative inactivity and unhappiness. However, the mood clearly lingered as the resulting images are solemn.

In the image Seated Woman on Bed, a woman in a nightgown is perched in her room. A mirror reflects a sliver of her reality – or perhaps offers a portal to a wished-for other one. There’s the slight shine of her wedding ring and the stray foot of someone sleeping among the rumpled sheets. The scene is tranquil, set with gauzy curtains and drab paintings of lakes, but the woman’s expression of alarm and despair reveals that her interior life is anything but calm.

Similarly, in Woman in Bathroom, the female subject is standing naked before a mirror, though not looking at herself. Evoking a disconnection between mind and body, the viewer sees her nude silhouette from behind – and a triptych of her face and exposed chest in the mirror’s reflection – yet for all that exposure, there’s no access to the thoughts that seem to haunt her. Throughout the series, the subjects are in a recurrent state of undress. “I was interested in representing skin and a certain kind of vulnerability,” Crewdson explains.

The characters’ inner malaise is all the more acute because it is at odds with the banality of the interiors. The orchestrated nature of the ordinariness – Crewdson having conceived and produced every detail from scratch – adds a sense of eeriness. “I was always interested in the uncanny, looking to find a sense of beauty and wonder in everyday life,” says Crewdson. It’s one of his enduring themes – he collaborated with Vogue Italia on Instagram, soliciting participants for a digital #uncannycontest.

There’s a frisson of a sixth sense at play – something ominous that has settled in. A critic once described Crewdson’s series as “half-stories, with no prelude and no denouement”. His images are hard to decipher individually, but cumulatively they’re threaded together by their very sense of atmospheric suspension. “The connections between one picture and another are elusive and open-ended,” he says.

“It’s a mystery, in the end, and I want it to remain so,” Crewdson adds. “That goes for everything: in life and art.”

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