Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (born September 26, 1962) is an American photographer. He photographs tableaux of American homes and neighborhoods.

Life and career

Crewdson was born in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He attended John Dewey High School.

As a teenager, he was part of a power pop group called The Speedies that hit the New York scene. Their song, "Let Me Take Your Foto" proved to be prophetic to Crewdson's future career. In 2005, Hewlett Packard used the song in advertisements to promote its digital cameras.

At Purchase College, State University of New York, he enrolled in a Photo 101 class taught by Laurie Simmons on a whim, and fell in love with the medium. He went on to study with Jan Groover before graduating. He then received his MFA in Photography at the Yale School of Art, where he is now a professor and director of graduate studies in Photography. In 2012, he was the subject of the feature documentary film Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. The film series followed the construction and the behind-the-scenes explanation from Crewdson himself of his thought process and vision for his pieces of his collection ''Beneath the Roses''.

Crewdson is represented by Gagosian Gallery.

Crewdson has been awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Photography and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. His work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.

He has two children, Lily and Walker, with his ex-wife Ivy Shapiro.

Style

Crewdson's photographs are elaborately staged and lit using crews familiar with motion picture production and lighting large scenes using motion picture film equipment and techniques. Using shots that resemble film productions, Crewdson deconstructs American suburban life in his work. He has cited the films ''Vertigo'', '' The Night of the Hunter'', ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'', '' Blue Velvet'', and ''Safe'' as having influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus.

Gregory Crewdson's most widely-known bodies of work include ''Twilight'' (1998–2002), ''Beneath the Roses'' (2003–2008), ''Cathedral of the Pines'' (2013–2014) and ''An Eclipse of Moths''. He works much like a director with a budget similar to that of a small movie production, each image involves dozens of people and weeks to months of planning.

Crewdson's only body of work made outside of the U.S. was ''Sanctuary'' (2009), set at the abandoned Cinecittá studios outside of Rome. Nearly all of his other work before and since was made in the small towns and cities in Western Massachusetts.

Exhibitions

* Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 1988
* BlumHelman Warehouse, New York; and traveled to Portland School of Art, Portland, Maine; Ruth Bloom Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 1991
* Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX, 1992
* Feigen Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1993
* Palm Beach Community College Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL, 1994
* Galleri Charlotte Lund, Stockholm, Sweden, 1995
* ''Les Images du Plaisir'', Frac des Pays de la Loire, Galerie des Carmes, La Flèche, France, 1995
* Jay Jopling / White Cube, London, 1995
* Ginza Artspace, Shiseido Co., Tokyo, 1996
* Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, 1997
* Espacio Uno, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, 1998; and traveled to Salamanca, 1999
* Rudofinium Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic, 2008
* ''Duane Hanson/Gregory Crewdson: Uncanny realities'', Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany, 2010–2011
* Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden, 2011
* ''Gregory Crewdson: In a Lonely Place'', C/O Berlin, Berlin, 2011; and traveled to Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2011/2012)
*''Cathedral of the Pines,'' Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY, 2016; The Photographers' Gallery, London, 2017.
*''The Becket Pictures'', FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 2017.

Publications

* ''Hover.'' Artspace Books, 1995. .
* ''Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson.'' Harry N. Abrams, 2002. . With an essay by Rick Moody.
* ''Gregory Crewdson: 1985–2005.'' Hatje Cantz, 2005. .
* ''Gregory Crewdson: Fireflies.'' Skarstedt Fine Art, 2007. .
* ''Beneath the Roses.'' With Russell Banks. Harry N. Abrams, 2008. .
* ''Sanctuary.'' With Anthony O. Scott. Hatje Cantz, 2010. .
* ''In a Lonely Place.'' Hatje Cantz, 2011. .
* ''Gregory Crewdson.'' New York: Rizzoli, 2013. .
* ''Cathedral of the Pines.'' New York: Aperture, 2016. . With a text by Alexander Nemerov.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Crewdson, Gregory
Fine art photographers
1962 births
Living people
Photographers from New York (state)
Artists from New York City
State University of New York at Purchase alumni
Yale School of Art alumni
People from Park Slope
John Dewey High School alumni
20th-century American photographers
21st-century American photographers
Brooklyn Friends School alumni