gregory crewdson: “beneath the roses”.

American photographer Gregory Crewdson’s work seems less like photographs, and more like moments captured from epic movies. Dark, troubling, with a definitive sci-fi twist, they seem inspired by The Twilight Zone – that sort of added terror where everything that’s wrong is made even worse by how normal it seems on the surface.

He’s tapped into that sort of uneasiness that can be so easily applied to our notion of suburbia, where the veneer of normalcy can be stripped away in layers. Desperate Housewives has explored it in a very mainstream way, but so has equally brilliant photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten in her series “Teenage Stories”.  Like Crewdson, she takes the everyday suburban landscape and populates it with something extra-ordinary. In Fullerton-Batten’s work it’s giant teenage girls, and in Crewdson’s it’s a variety of black hauntings; his shots are full of quiet moments where you can tell that something gruesome has just occurred, where we’re watching the reality settle it. Known for building entire sets on which to stage his shots, including hanging spotlights in the sky and using almost cinematically-scoped wide frame lenses, his pictures are intimate and epic at the same time.

Crewdson holds a Master of Fine Arts from Yale and has taught on the faculty there, at an other colleges, since 1993. As a teenager, he was in punk band The Speedies, where they fortuitously released a hit song in 1979 called “Let Me Take Your Foto”. You can listen to the track while looking over a huge variety of Crewdson’s work here, and if you’re on the punkstalgia tip you can check out the original vid for the song here.

His latest hardcover release “Beneath The Roses” shows his photographic series of the same name, created between 2002 and 2005. This is just the latest in a series of successful books encompassing his collections, following “Gregory Crewdson: 1985-2005″ and “Twilight”.

Via Ari Stein @ Lost At E Minor

Comments

  1. The link to the “interesting interview” is broken.

  2. And I first saw his work in Western Mass. at MassMOCA. To see it live is, of course, a much different experience from viewing it in a book. Thanks for highlighting his work here.

  3. Harry Gousopoulos says:

    I saw a Crewdson exhibition last year in The Hague. I had to tear myself away. His stuff is brilliant.

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  1. […] Crewdson, who constructs elaborate melancholic scenes of American suburbia, like in his series ‘Beneath the Roses‘. I’m a big fan of Gregory Crewdson’s work and find the fact that he often […]

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