Gregory Crewdson: 1985–2005

by Gregory Crewdson (Photographer), Stephan Berg (Editor), Martin Hochleitner (Contributor)

In his photographs, Gregory Crewdson (born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York) presents artfully condensed stories that essentially deal with the penetration of the mysterious into normalcy. In an image from his Twilight series (1998-2002), we see yellow school buses parked outside white wooden houses. Groups of students stand or lie around passively in different places. An idyllic scene, but only at first glance, as the image seems oddly "uncanny" in the Freudian sense. It shows something familiar yet unsettling, different, and somewhat inexplicable. What is really happening here? Crewdson goes to great lengths in dramatizing his disturbing suburban scenes, employing means more typical of Hollywood film productions. Using elaborate lighting, cranes, props, and extras, he stages his scenes, which are at the same time always an accurate portrayal of everyday life in America, with obsessive attention to detail.

This publication is the first to assemble all of the artist's photographic productions in a single volume and includes his most recent, previously unpublished series Beneath the Roses.

Genres: Photography, Art, Art and Photography

242 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2005

About the author

Gregory Crewdson’s photographs have entered the American visual lexicon, taking their place alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as indelible evocations of a silent psychological interzone between the everyday and the uncanny. Often working with a large team, Crewdson typically plans each image with meticulous attention to detail, orchestrating light, color, and production design to conjure dreamlike scenes infused with mystery and suspense. While the small-town settings of many of Crewdson’s images are broadly familiar, he is careful to avoid signifiers of identifiable sites and moments, establishing a world outside time.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Crewdson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. He lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has produced a succession of widely acclaimed bodies of work, from Natural Wonder (1992–97) to Cathedral of the Pines (2013–14). Beneath the Roses (2003–08), a series of pictures that took nearly ten years to complete—and which employed a crew of more than one hundred people—was the subject of the 2012 feature documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro.

Reviews

[Tempest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gregory Crewdson is a photographer who quotes ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ to be one of his most major aesthetic influences. His large-scale photographs, made with the same budget and production of a movie, are eerie, uncomfortable, and occasionally hauntingly beautiful. His figures stare at the unseen, interact with the supernatural. The lighting is perfect. But what makes you feel so incredibly uneasy isn’t necessarily the vacant stare or illogical poses. It’s the fact that Crewdson, shooting with a large-format camera, takes three shots of each scene. One of the foreground, one of the middle-ground, and one of the background. He pieces these together in photoshop, seamlessly. What results is an image completely in sharp focus. You don’t know what it is, you can’t put your finger on why these images make you feel uncomfortable. But your eye recognizes something that your brain can’t comprehend because it’s not the norm. The disconnect between the two causes a tension that draws the audience in, makes them uncomfortable, but in a lasting and intriguing manner.

[Jin-Ah Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

My only regret...never taking a class taught by Gregory Crewdson...now I'd have to travel to Yale.

[Paul H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sort of a cross between DiCorcia and the New Topographics folks; eerie set-designed suburbia on large-format film, 100% impressive.

Also I'm happy that people were so cooperative with his elaborate setups, lol:

After looking around a while, I finally found a house that would be perfect for what I had in mind. I knocked on the door and explained what I wanted to do. I needed to pour a perfect circle of fresh soil in the center of their yard, close their street, and park a giant boom lift in front of their house to support me and the 8 x 10 camera eighty feet above the scene. The woman thought about it a moment before replying, 'Do what you have to do.'

[Edward Kidder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this photographer-- if Edward Hopper and David Lynch had a love child who became a still photographer, he might do work like Gregory Crewdson. The only short coming with this book is that the original photographs are often very very large, so much of the detail is lost unless you study the book with a magnifying glass.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What emerges are poignant images of a society confronting the abysmal depths of its own damaged psyche, a quasi-hypnotized society that is just as alienated from itself as it is from the fragile reality through which it continues to walk."