American angst in the photographs of Gregory Crewdson

THE claims of photography to veracity, and the fallacy of such claims, were discussed here some weeks ago in reviewing the Jeff Wall exhibition.

Gregory Crewdson

THE claims of photography to veracity, and the fallacy of such claims, were discussed here some weeks ago in reviewing the Jeff Wall exhibition, which recently closed in Perth and will reopen at the National Gallery of Victoria on November 30.

Coincidentally, photography and its falsifications are also the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. Illusion and reality are also central to the work of Gregory Crewdson, another North American, now showing at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne.

Photography's prima facie claim to truth lies in the fact it is a straightforward mechanical recording of visible reality, a direct imprint of the visible light reflected from objects in the world on to a photosensitive surface. In principle, this is done without the intervention of the human hand, although as we have observed before, the hand is more or less subtly present from the setting of the camera to the process of development, retouching and printing.

But the deception of photography is not confined to the deliberate corrections, manipulations, enhancements and outright falsifications to which it can be subjected. There is also a fundamental problem in the fact it passively registers a luminous imprint of the visible world - in other words, a flaw at the heart of the argument for truth.

The point is that such an objective registration of visual phenomena is no more the truth of the world than a dead body is the truth of the deceased person. Consider the perennial problem of portraits painted from photographs: they are easy because all you have to do is copy a flat image. But they are lifeless because a person is not a flat image; a person is not even a three-dimensional thing, not in fact an object that can be copied but a subject with whom you must engage as another subject.

The same is true, less obviously, of trees and plants, and even apparently inanimate things such as mountains and bodies of water. A landscape painted from a photograph is as lifeless as a portrait; the painter cannot copy a pictorial imprint of the scene but must try to capture and re-enact its life, what Chinese writers about art called its chi or breath.

This is not to say, of course, that photographers cannot make good portraits or landscapes, but they have to employ their own devices to compensate for the limitations of the medium. And on occasion they may deliberately exploit the obtuseness and objective inertness of the photographic image, as Bill Henson does in his early crowd scenes. But artifice is needed even to make banality significant as banality, just as a dramatist such as Samuel Beckett must use eloquence to convey the idea of inarticulacy.

Crewdson, whose work is surveyed under the title In a Lonely Place, is clearly concerned to evoke dullness and alienation, and to that end exploits the tendency of the photographic image to inertness. Like Wall, however, he employs an elaborate and expensive film-production process in the pictures for which he is best known, the Beneath the Roses series made between 2003 and 2008. No artifice is spared to animate the world he has chosen to portray with a paradoxically vivid sense of its own leaden entropy.

The text that greets viewers to the gallery emphasises the evocation of "American anxiety", and that is undoubtedly true in a general sense. The most successful pictures in the series, though, are less explicit, and evoke vacancy and passive angst rather than the kind of paranoia exploited by Hollywood. The compositions do not have individual titles, but the single most memorable one shows a wide, snow-covered street in the ambiguous light of early evening. A car has turned into the street, leaving a single pair of tracks, and seems to have stopped, although the lights are only amber. Its headlights are on, showing us that the street is darker than it seems, perhaps because of the luminosity of the snow.

For all the vastness of the space in the middle of the composition, one feels almost suffocated by the mute banality of the environment. So far, though, the illusion of a found place is maintained; there is a little more conscious fiction in the awning of the cinema, showing Brief Encounter, the poignant 1945 film written by Noel Coward and directed by David Lean, about an impossible relationship. On the right of the composition, a woman sits alone in a cafe, a recollection of Edward Hopper, while a man stands under the awning as though uncertain whether to go in.

Another image that is effective in its reticence is of a group of houses in the evening light, the only figure being a woman standing in her doorway, looking suspiciously out at us. Although this picture, like the previous one, seems to use an existing location, it is clear that great care has been taken with the lighting and the treatment of colour and tone to achieve the quiet harmony and impassivity that support the sense of loneliness and even dull fear.

Other compositions make more prominent and explicit use of figures and quasi-cinematic mise en scene, like one in which an old man sits in a dingy interior, staring grimly but blankly at an unseen television set that illuminates his figure with a deathly livid glow. In the background a young woman, presumably his daughter, is seen from behind as she prepares the evening meal. The table is set for two; we are in fact invited to read and infer the story of a picture such as this is the same way that we interpret the moralistic or pathetic subject of a Victorian genre painting.

In one such composition, we look through a motel or boarding-house room - the numbered key is on the bed - into the cold light of an open bathroom to see a thin, naked woman of about 40, with grey hair, looking down at blood on her thigh. Is it her period? Or the aftermath of a botched abortion? Adjacent is another image: once again a motel, and this time a young woman, seen from outside through the window, sitting alone and disconsolate on the edge of a bed, while her baby lies on the bed, naked and vulnerable. The disturbing sense that demoralisation has corroded even the visceral instinct of motherhood similarly pervades a further composition in which a young pregnant woman stands a little too far out on a dawn street opposite a pregnancy clinic.

Less successful is a picture in which a girl stands in a slip on the street, at night, presumably outside her house, while a taxi with a young passenger appears to be leaving after dropping her off. The subject is rather obvious and seems to tell us more than it shows, to borrow Henry James's terms. The figure of the girl fits awkwardly into the setting, too, as though she has been added in digitally. Similarly, the picture of a mother and son sitting miserably at dinner, apparently waiting in vain for the arrival of two extra people whose places are set, is too overt and almost melodramatic in mood to allow the viewer much imaginative space.

The exterior compositions, with smaller figures and subtler narrative content, also derive greater expressive resonance from the settings Crewdson uses, which are decaying American towns whose 19-century timber houses are slowly falling apart from lack of maintenance, as we see in one picture in which our eye is first drawn to the little figure of a man pushing a supermarket cart full of domestic possessions, and we realise only after a moment's inspection that one of the houses in the street has a shattered wall and another has plastic sheeting inside, perhaps because it leaks. In another composition, one of these old houses is burning while some young people look on passively.

In complete contrast to these large narrative compositions is the early (1996) series of black-and-white photographs of fireflies. The pictures are small and intimate as befits the subject, and necessarily nocturnes: dark images in which we make out the silhouettes of trees, but dotted with the flashes and squiggles of light produced by the little creatures as they swarm in front of the camera. The effect is quiet and still, yet filled with animation, like the intermittent sounds of living creatures that fill the silence of a night in the bush.

The most recent series, Sanctuary (2009), is based on the movie studio complex outside Rome known as Cinecitta - Cinema City - famous as the studio used by Fellini and many other Italian filmmakers, and for films such as Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis. Crewdson was so impressed by a visit to the site that he undertook a black-and-white series that uses no production crew or special effects but relies entirely on the intrinsic qualities of the place, with its collection of elaborate and abandoned film sets.

In some cases, as in one set of a Roman street, the illusion is still intact, and one can imagine one is looking at a reconstruction of part of Pompeii or Ostia. In a 19th-century streetscape, we see a shop sign for a forno, a bakery, and it is hard to believe there is not, and never has been, an oven behind that painted facade. In other instances, the illusion is broken: the set is collapsing in parts, or the shot is taken from the other side, revealing the scaffolding that holds the whole thing up. Sandbags and other extraneous items are scattered about and here and there we can even see modern apartment buildings beyond the Roman houses.

On the whole though, it is not the details that concern Crewdson, but the sense of the whole environments created by these sets. He gazes through gateways, down streets, out into squares. He is looking at the spaces so carefully crafted as the settings of stories, and it is the lack of these stories that he makes us feel. All the animation and the illusion - the sort of thing Fellini reflects on repeatedly in his films - has fallen silent and left only these spaces of melancholy reflection.

Crewdson's earlier work was about stories too, but sometimes they were told too emphatically. Here, everything is simpler and more subtle. The pictures are not only black and white, but much smaller; they speak in a quieter voice but with greater confidence. The form and the technical realisation are perfectly calibrated to the subject matter: tonal balance creates the right poise of drama and reverie, and the open compositions invite the viewer into a ghost town of forgotten fictions.

Gregory Crewdson: In a Lonely Place, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, until November 11; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, March 16 to May 25, 2013.