Gregory Crewdson is a photographer who uses actors, lighting, locations, sets, art direction, and production crews to construct everyday American suburbia like a scene from a film. This page sets out the unease of the still image — a cinematic production that nevertheless holds none of cinema’s time.
Crewdson borrows the production apparatus of cinema while making a single photograph in which the story does not advance. A photograph as a film that has lost its time leaves the suburbs, family, desire, and silence as an inexplicable mystery.
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Born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at SUNY Purchase and Yale University School of Art, and is also involved in photography education at the Yale School of Art*2.
Gagosian places series such as Natural Wonder, Twilight, Beneath the Roses, Sanctuary, and Cathedral of the Pines at the center of his artist biography*1.
Making not the event, but its before and after
Crewdson’s photographs do not find an event; they make a moment that seems to be just after, or just before, an event*1.
Like a film, yet not a film
Using actors, lighting, sets, art direction, and production crews, he constructs an image like a single scene from a film, yet the story advances neither forward nor back*3.
A window onto the interior of the suburbs
Suburban houses, driveways, woods, windows, and artificial lighting are arranged as a stage that leaves behind only a psychological unease*5.
Crewdson is positioned as an important artist of staged photography, tableau photography, and cinematic photography after Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman*1.
His historical significance lies in having carried to an extreme, through a vast production apparatus, the state in which a photograph holds a sense of reality even though it is not a record*1.