Crewdson’s epic photographic trilogy―a portrait of America a decade in the making Over the past three decades, Gregory Crewdson has been fleshing out a portrait of middle America, an America gazing wide-eyed at the glimmers of a fading dream. His cinematographically staged photos have pieced together the fragments of a twilight world tinged with numbness. This book brings together three bodies of work made between 2012 and 2022: Cathedral of the Pines (2012–14), An Eclipse of Moths (2018–19) and Eveningside (2021–22). Envisaged as a trilogy, they provide unique insight into a decade of creation and offer a comprehensive view of the universe that has positioned Crewdson as one of the major figures of contemporary photography. This trilogy is introduced by Fireflies (1996), a pivotal series for grasping the intimate undercurrents in Crewdson’s work. Gregory Crewdson (born 1962) is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale School of Art, where he is now the director of graduate studies in photography. His series Beneath the Roses is the subject of the 2012 documentary Gregory Brief Encounters . His work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe. Crewdson is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York.
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.
The three main photo collections are so intriguing. A unique tone that crosses many different styles throughout his career. Print quality is excellent.