Alone Street

by Gregory Crewdson (Photographer), Cate Blanchett (Interviews)

Alone Street brings together two major bodies of work by Gregory Crewdson, Cathedral of the Pines (Aperture, 2016) and An Eclipse of Moths (Aperture, 2020), in a single, elegant, and affordable monograph. Both series expand on the artist’s obsessive exploration of the psychogeography of small-town, post-industrial New England and underscore the precision and depth of Crewdson’s unique mode of photographic storytelling. In each image, light, color, and carefully crafted scenography evoke the feeling that, as art historian Alexander Nemerov has astutely described, “all that ever happened in these places seems crystallized in his tableaux, as if the quiet melancholy of Crewdson’s scenes gathered the unruly sorrows and other little-guessed feelings of people long-gone who once stood on those spots.”

In addition to the full set of images from each series, Alone Street, presents a selection of behind-the-scenes images and storyboards, revealing the extensive preparation and planning that went into the making of each work.

Genres: Photography, Art

180 pages, Hardcover

First published November 16, 2021

About the author

Gregory Crewdson’s photographs have entered the American visual lexicon, taking their place alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as indelible evocations of a silent psychological interzone between the everyday and the uncanny. Often working with a large team, Crewdson typically plans each image with meticulous attention to detail, orchestrating light, color, and production design to conjure dreamlike scenes infused with mystery and suspense. While the small-town settings of many of Crewdson’s images are broadly familiar, he is careful to avoid signifiers of identifiable sites and moments, establishing a world outside time.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Crewdson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. He lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has produced a succession of widely acclaimed bodies of work, from Natural Wonder (1992–97) to Cathedral of the Pines (2013–14). Beneath the Roses (2003–08), a series of pictures that took nearly ten years to complete—and which employed a crew of more than one hundred people—was the subject of the 2012 feature documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro.

Reviews

[Jeffrey McCullough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and disturbing. Residents of a world gone to seed and long in the past

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alone Street is a highly choreographed photography book that has a powerful narrative, but one of your own making, as you will envision different scenarios from the images in front of you.

The surreal photographs, which are actually video stills, are dark and disquieting, filled with morose people. While naked bodies and sexuality are incorporated in several pictures, it is all portrayed in a grim manner with no love or affection shown between the participants. Loneliness seeps from the pages. Both indoor and outdoor scenes are staged, with great attention to detail. This artificiality made me ponder the time and money poured into creating each specific look, from finding the cars and decor of the era to employing the actors and actresses that were never shown in a flattering light.

The book is divided into several sections. The first, Cathedral of the Pines, includes pictures from Crewdson's previous photography book of the same name, and includes an opening essay by author Joyce Carol Oates. The second was An Eclipse of Moths, with photographs that were new to me. Preceding that was a transcript of an interview that actress Cate Blanchett had with him during the Covid lockdown. The final section was production documents from crew members from Crewdson Studio, which I found illuminating as to what goes on behind the scenes in creating these unique photos.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every photograph in this collection tells a story of individual aloneness, as well as the collective loneliness of humankind. It's really moving. Lovely full-page images.