Fireflies

by Gregory Crewdson

In the summer of 1996, Gregory Crewdson spent two solitary months at his family's cabin in Becket, Massachusetts. Using both small- and medium-format cameras, he obsessively photographed the fireflies that came alive at dusk each evening. Crewdson was drawn to the flickering lights, in part, by the underlying impossibility of capturing their elusive beauty in pictures. This luxurious volume, featuring 61 full-page tritone reproductions, calls to mind many of the hallmarks of Crewdson's oeuvre, from the sense of wonder in the nocturnal landscape, to the focus on light as a narrative event, to the fascination with nature as a psychological mystery. Although consistent in terms of their subject matter, these photographs demonstrate a wide scope of visual expression ranging from almost pure abstraction to more idyllic representations of the natural landscape.

Genres: Art, Photography

128 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2007

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

[Dain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for a provocative photo essay, and this one was right up my alley. It's a little campy, but you can see some of the aesthetic that Crewdson would become famous for in his more contemporary photos; namely, that the image tells a story. Just like his well-known photos, one has to look closely to decipher all the layers of meaning that the photos capture. I'm thinking about using a few of these plates for prompts in my Creative Writing class.

[Catherine Corman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fireflies represented something very particular to me that summer, so simple yet imbued with significance...Even as I was photographing, I realized the underlying impossibility of my task at hand. I was trying to immortalize moments that would soon vanish.

-Gregory Crewdson, Fireflies

[raul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crewdson without the crew alone in the woods.