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Overview
While visiting Rome, world-renowned photographer Gregory Crewdson was invited to tour the legendary film studio Cinecittà, where directors such as Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini shot their iconic works. He found the elaborate film sets fallen into ruin and, captivated by their beauty, chose them as the subject of his next body of work. Although his earlier series were characterized by large production crews, custom-built soundstages, and hired actors, Crewdson returned to Rome with only a small team to create the haunting black-and-white portraits of deteriorating buildings and deserted streets that are flawlessly reproduced in this book. Admirers of Crewdson’s work will find these new photographs are a bold departure, which yet convey the dramatic subtext and charged emotions that characterize his earlier works.
Synopsis
While visiting Rome, world-renowned photographer Gregory Crewdson was invited to tour the legendary film studio Cinecittà, where directors such as Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini shot their iconic works. He found the elaborate film sets fallen into ruin and, captivated by their beauty, chose them as the subject of his next body of work. Although his earlier series were characterized by large production crews, custom-built soundstages, and hired actors, Crewdson returned to Rome with only a small team to create the haunting black-and-white portraits of deteriorating buildings and deserted streets that are flawlessly reproduced in this book. Admirers of Crewdson’s work will find these new photographs are a bold departure, which yet convey the dramatic subtext and charged emotions that characterize his earlier works.
Publishers Weekly
In these 40 black-and-white photographs, Crewdson (Beneath the Roses) travels to Rome's Cinecittà studio, home to some of the most famous works of Italian cinema. While Crewdson emphasizes the artificiality of a film set (and the photographic medium itself) by portraying the Cinecittà as a composition of gray tonalities, he also suggests the possibility of movement and life, and teases us with nonsensical elements that prevent the sequence from forming a coherent narrative: a small set of stairs leads to nowhere, dull light casts shadows through a distant doorway, and Roman architecture stands next to modern scaffolding. As film critic A.O. Scott notes in his lyrical preface, Crewdson--like the discontinuous world of the unconscious--gives us "the sense that what we are looking at is both actual and illusory." Unlike Crewdson's previous work, those color-saturated shots like film stills, this collection addresses the dream world of film in a historically significant setting, but the relationship with the viewer remains intimate, as he or she becomes "the solitary walker tiptoeing through secret places and dreaming fragmentary epics." (Sept.)