GREGORY CREWDSON

INsight Artist, 2013

“What I’ve always been after is a picture that tells a story. I see it all in my head beforehand, and I set out obsessively—maybe even narcissistically—to make it. Very little is improvised in the end, though I am open to serendipity in some details. In part I see what I am doing as exploring the American psyche through the American vernacular landscape, much as Hopper did.” —Gregory Crewdson

Known for elaborately staged large-scale photographs, Gregory Crewdson builds his images elementally, working toward the moment where a story emerges. The photographs from Beneath the Roses take place in the homes, streets, and forests of unnamed small towns and portray emotionally charged moments of seemingly ordinary individuals caught in ambiguous and often disquieting circumstances. Both epic in scale and intimate in scope, these visually breathtaking photographs blur the distinctions between cinema and photography, reality and fantasy, what has happened and what is to come. The end result is made possible by an extensive crew that includes a production designer, director of photography, producers, actors, and many others.

Born in Brooklyn in 1962, Gregory Crewdson grew up intrigued by the work of his father, a psychoanalyst who saw his patients in the family basement. At sixteen, he formed a rock band called the Speedies. Their first single: Let Me Take Your Foto. Crewdson has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York City. His work has been included in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere. He received the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Currently he is Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Yale University School of Art, where he earned his MFA in 1998. His published books include Hover, Dream of Life, Twilight, and Beneath the Roses. He is the subject of the documentary film, Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters.