In 2017, the French Auvergne Regional Funds for Contemporary Arts (FRAC) invited the American photographer Gregory Crewdson in an exhibition called “Gregory Crewdson – The Becket Pictures”. It was the first show of this major, internationally acclaimed artist in a French institution. The Clermont-based institution brought back the exhibition to life through a virtual tour. Three years ago, an interview was also displayed in the exhibition room. Here is the documentary.
Gregory Crewdson was born in New York in 1962, he still lives and works there. Made during the 1980s, his first series depicted a theme that became the red thread of his work: neurosis, “from its most indicative manifestations to its most visible traces”. His eye captured, into compositions, still life or portraits, boxes of anxiolytics scattered on bedside tables, faces worn down by fatigue, interiors and homes gnawed on the inside. Inspired by cinematographic stages, his imagination is also rooted in American literature, especially roman noir. The Twilight, Dream House and Beneath the Roses series, made between 1998 and 2005, intertwined an autobiographical facet with a larger portrait, that of an America consumed by doubts, muffled anguish, “oozing with despondency and boredom”. His photography bears witness to the theater of the middle American cities, where pernicious life mixes with boredom and depression.
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