Photography, Spring 2008: Gregory Crewdson to Ron Diorio
From John Haber
Maybe art can no longer believe in Modernism's "make it new," but it can still make things strange. Several artists have returned to settings that Edward Hopper would recognize as his own and that Alfred Stieglitz might have photographed. Each has an abortive love affair with cities and towns, big and small.
Gregory Crewdson captures two years in the life of a small town. It could lie upstate, and yet to all appearances he might have invented it, and in fact Anne Hardy has invented hers. Sherry Karver and E. E. Smith turn to New York City itself, to see how individuals can elude today's surveillance cameras. Ron Diorio spans rural settings and city stoops, manipulating a painterly blur with digital precision. At least one, Karver, really is a painter. Each manipulates the light in order to see it, and each knows how the apparent clarity of vision can mask the strangeness of what it observes.
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