Cinephilic Pilgrimages and the Reification of Profilmic Space

Abstract

Since 2009, Gail Albert Halaban has been seeking out and photographing houses painted by Edward Hopper in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the 1920s.¹ Titled Hopper Redux, this series of large-scale light box images replicates the frame and vantage point of the original paintings, but with certain modifications. Her motivation is twofold. On the one hand, she wanted to see how another artist captured in paint a region with which she herself was intimately familiar. On the other hand, she wanted to explore a comparison identified by critics between her earlier photographic series Out My Window (2007–) and Hopper’s paintings.² As she puts it, “People kept comparing me to Hopper and I wanted to know where that came from.”³ What this work accomplishes as a prefatory example in the context of this chapter is threefold. First, it exemplifies an art practice involving the act of pilgrimage, the physical journey to a special or sacred place. Second, it represents an artistic process that leads to discovery about its objects of scrutiny—Hopper’s house paintings, among other things. Third, and perhaps most appropriately, it stands as yet another example of a practice inflected by Hitchcock. For the modifications Albert Halaban introduces into Hopper Redux are ones inspired by Hitchcockian mise-en-scène, modifications that serve to “render these already familiar tableaux uncanny” and create a “heightened sense of artifice [to] underscore[s] the photographs’ status as re-presentations.”⁴