Stranger than Fiction

The photograph Untitled (Dream House), 2002, is plagued with uncertainty. You cannot determine where this home is located, but you know it is in suburbia. You cannot discern what time it is outside, but you know it is dawn or dusk. You cannot see if anyone is home, yet all the lights are on. Gregory Crewdson’s photograph, on display at Espace Louis Vuitton München, brings rural America to Germany. 

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“Picture Window” is a presentation of two past series from the American photographer––“Dream House,” 2002, and “Cathedral of the Pines,” 2014. The exhibition is part of the international “Hors-le-murs” art program from Fondation Louis Vuitton, which features renowned artwork across the foundation’s global exhibition spaces. Crewdson’s large-scale images depict abandoned streets at night, individuals alone in the snow-covered woods, and family members coexisting in their rooms. These scenes are a cinematic capturing of suburban existence, and yet they are psychologically oppressive and imbued with a hallucinatory surrealism. They have the dreamlike darkness of a David Lynch film and the silent despair of a Raymond Carver story. 

The photographs in “Dream House,” 2002 are uncanny, movie-like scenes set in the nighttime that show individuals silently existing in the interior and exterior of their homes. In one untitled frame, Philip Seymour Hoffman sits in a car at an ambiguous hour of night. In the middle of a neighborhood street, the trunk of the car is filled with flowers, and Hoffman gazes blankly at those strewn across the road before him.

Crewdson has spent over three decades crafting a pictorial commentary on rural American life. The current director of graduate photography at Yale University School of Art is known for his elaborate sets and massive teams who intricately stage his Lynchian depictions of the everyday—take the 100-person crew behind his series “Beneath the Roses,” 2003-2008. In 2014, the photographer coupled his penetrating depiction of domestic life with grandiose movie-like stills for the series “Cathedral of the Pines.” One scene,The Mattress, 2014, captures a man alone in the woods at a distance, looking at a mattress covered in petals, while two cop cars are parked behind him in a misty clearing. 

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Through his innovative use of sets, lighting, and cinematic techniques, Crewdson’s uncanny photographs speak to the desolation of suburban America. However, the blurred duality of fiction and reality, film and photograph, gives Crewdson’s scenes a perturbing existence.

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‍“Picture Window” is now on view through February 22, 2025 at Espace Louis Vuitton München, Maximilianstraße 2a, 80539 München, Germany.