#2 Gregory Crewdson

Born 1962 in Brooklyn, lives in New York City.

Crewdson’s intricate compositions require up to four weeks of planning on the part of the artist and many hours of set design and lighting with the help of more than 35 stagehands, electricians, gaffers, and actors. These elaborate techniques, coupled with powerfully suggestive scenes, have garnered Crewdson recognition as one of the major forces in narrative photography.


Untitled (pregnant woman/pool), 1999. Laser direct C-print, Edition 4/10, 50 x 60 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee. 2000.70.


Untitled (sod man), 1999. Laser direct C-print, Edition 8/10, 50 x 60 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Purchased with funds contributed by the Young Collectors Council. 2000.92.



Untitled (family dinner), 2001–02. Digital C-print, 53 x 65 inches (framed). AP 2/3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee. 2002.30.

He was recently on show at the Whitecube Gallery in London, Hoxton Square.

"American photographer Gregory Crewdson's work is notable as existing within the photographic tradition initially developed by the likes of William Eggleston and Walker Evans in a head on collision with filmmakers Stephen Speilberg and David Lynch.

Crewdson primarily depicts the home and suburban disquiet within his photographs, creating elaborate sets worthy of a Hollywood production in order to enhance the sense of malaise and unease. Crewdson's still images act as disturbingly incomplete sentences, with little reference to what went on before and what may follow. Crewdson himself has referred the 'limitations of a photograph in terms of narrative capacity to have an image that is frozen in time, (where) there's no before or after' and has turned that limitation to strength.

Earlier pieces such as 'Untitled' (Suburban Lawn) from 1987-1988 and 'Untitled' (Mulch Circle) of 1997 are most remarkable for what is omitted from the picture frame. Eerily silent gardens on hot summer days where children do not play and the garden table, layered with food appears hurriedly abandoned. A darkened desolate lawn, a car erratically parked on top of the immaculately cut grass and the sparsity of the surroundings emphasised by the illuminated windows. In the series 'Twilight' (1998 - 2002), Crewdson takes these ideas further and makes vivid our imaginations and hidden fears. The mother that appears naked at the dinner table, bearing a vapid expression, whilst the family 'carries on regardless' is chilling in it's closeness to reality, the feeling evoked by these psychologically charged cinematic stills is one that this really 'could happen to you', whilst other images - the man climbing the floral beanstalk, could be straight out of dreamland.

Fantastical in outcome, Crewdson's photographs are often the result of highly complex staged scenes that are constructed by the artist and then digitally manipulated. This process from concept to conclusion is lengthy and again subverts the age-old conviction in the power of the camera to record 'truths'.

Gregory Crewdson teaches at Yale University, from where he graduated in 1988 and has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain (1998), Emily Carr institute of Art and Design, Vancouver (2000) and Site Sante Fe, New Mexico (2001). Aspen Art Museum will present a survey of Crewdson's work in 2002/03 and he also curated the exhibition 'American Standard (Para) Normality and Everyday Life' at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York in 2002."
http://www.whitecube.com/html/artists/grc/grc_frset.html


Untitled (flower pile). 2001. Digital C-print. 48 x 60 in.


Untitled (woman stain). 2001. Digital C-print. 48 x 60 in.