Sanctuary

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.)