Gregory Crewdson: Edward Hopper's Nightmares
An unsettling America has taken up residence at Galerie Templon in Brussels. American photographer Gregory Crewdson unveils eighteen photographs from “Eveningside.”
By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Gregory Crewdson.
The final chapter of a trilogy begun in 2012 with “Cathedral of the Pines” and followed by “An Eclipse of Moths,” this series completes a cycle rooted in the small towns of Massachusetts that Gregory Crewdson has known since childhood. Fog, artificial rain, lighting worthy of a Hollywood set: each image is born of an extraordinarily demanding production process, involving storyboards, actors, technicians, and special effects. The ghosts of David Lynch, Steven Spielberg, and Alfred Hitchcock are never far away.
Solitary figures appear caught in ordinary gestures whose meaning eludes us, often placed behind a window, in front of a door, beneath a bridge, within the kind of twilit suburban settings that evoke the cult series Twin Peaks as much as 1940s film noir. This is Crewdson’s striking power: familiar scenes shot through with an uncanny strangeness, tracing in negative the dark side of the American Dream, the very terrain where painter Edward Hopper once laid down his brush and photographer Walker Evans his lens.
Leaving behind the color palettes and panoramic formats of his previous series, the photographer opts here for a tighter frame and a black-and-white palette — an unprecedented choice in his body of work. From this new closeness emerges a sense of intimacy between the viewer and characters who seem lost in some unreachable elsewhere, drifting through fog-laden landscapes scarred by economic decline. Time appears frozen, suspended between a before and an after.
Never didactic, the artist leaves us free to imagine the stories buried beneath the surface of these masterful compositions. His monochromatic nuances blur the line between fiction and reality, giving the impression of gazing upon sets whose extras have forgotten the script. Gregory Crewdson does not narrate America: he captures it in a spatiotemporal in-between, in a state of perfect equilibrium between photography and cinema.
“Eveningside” by Gregory Crewdson is on view through April 18, 2026, at Galerie Templon in Brussels.
