Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighborhoods.

Over the past few years, Crewdson's productions have become increasingly ambitious; his photographs sometimes require dozens of assistants and technicians, large format cameras, an array of lights, make-up and wardrobe, as well as computerised post-production. For his next show in New York, however, he has dusted off some old images he took of fireflies. "The pictures couldn't be simpler. They're elemental. They're just pictures of light made in twilight." Crewdson works very closely with his DP, Director of Photography and only uses continuous lights on his projects. An Eclipse of Moths. New York: Aperture, 2020. ISBN 978-1683952213. With an introduction by Jeff Tweedy. Contemporary Photography in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, USAIn this interview, acclaimed photographer, Gregory Crewdson shares with us insight into his techniques. O'Hagan, Sean (June 20, 2017). "Cue mist! Gregory Crewdson, the photographer with a cast, a crew and a movie-sized budget". The Guardian. London . Retrieved June 30, 2017. Cathedral of the Pines, Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2016; [62] Galerie Templon, Brussels and Paris concurrently, September–October 2016; [63] The Photographers' Gallery, London, 2017; [64] Centre of Contemporary Art, Toruń, Poland, November 2017 – January 2018 [65] Festival and exhibitions: ‘What Makes Us Human? Image in the Age of A.I.’ at the PhotoVogue Festival, BASE Milano,Milan

Clearly, he has a vision. A pretty specific one, too: he’s said that every artist has one story to tell, one they keep telling over and over, which may or may not be true in general, but certainly is for Crewdson, who is often criticized for doing the same thing over and over. (Which isn’t far off: at least with Twilight and now Beneath the Roses, the themes and technique are the same. The difference seems to be that the magical and inexplicable is toned down more in the later work, and the aspect ratio has changed from 5:4 to 3:2). It’s a bleak America Crewdson imagines, one where wonder seems to be an emotional high and resentment, resignation, sadness, loneliness and quiet contemplation seem to be the emotional average. It’s easy to put it down as too depressing, but who says Crewdson is trying to give us the complete picture? I doubt it. Not long ago I praised Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger for its character portrait, all the while noting that it is the bleakest novel I know of, certainly the bleakest I’ve ever finished. Delivering a bleak and depressing message is not in and of itself grounds for criticism. But I could never really hear anything,” he says of his childhood eavesdropping. “All I knew was that it was a secret and that it was forbidden.” He laughs. “And there you have it. There’s my work in a nutshell.” Photochrome, Current Contemporary Photography from New York City Galleries, Silvermine Guild Galleries, New Cannan, USA Influenced by Pop Art, Hanson turned to thematising everyday American life, frequently switching his observations to a critically satirical attitude that was, however, always guided by compassion. Housewives, construction workers, car salesmen, or janitors – the models for his figures are people in the American middle and working classes in whose biographies the disappointment in the American dream has become entrenched. He often puts his people and all of their small insufficiencies into perspective with ironic kindness, such as, for example, the Tourists, in whom are combined all of the clichés associated with the typical Florida tourist.Imperfect Innocence, The Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, USA In the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman began taking a series of photographs in which she re-created the promotional stills from Hollywood B-movies. Crewdson first began to photograph suburban life while working on his Master of Fine Arts thesis at Yale University between 1986 and 1988, asking residents from the nearby town of Lee, Massachusetts to participate in a series of theatrically composed genre scenes. Sommer, Tim (August 3, 2002). "In the Late '70s, Teen Punks Ruled New York. These Are Their Stories". The New York Times.

Famed photographer Gregory Crewdson will present the inaugural discussion in a series sponsored by the Photography Society of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City… What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world. Gregory Crewdson might not need an introduction, and if he does, I’ve written about him before. In short, he makes large-scale staged photographs. The photos are set in suburban and small-town America, and depict everything noir in a sort of perpetual twilight (indeed one of his books is called Twilight): loneliness, alienation, apathy, resignation, mystery, contemplation, confusion; you catch my drift. The production is huge, so are the prints, and the price tag on them, but the books are affordable enough that I’ve bought his latest, Beneath the Roses. Crewdson was born in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he attended Brooklyn Friends School, and then John Dewey High School.But I’m not Gregory Crewdson. He’s saying something with these pictures — and like all mediums, photography is at its best when it says something that cannot be said in another medium, like writing, so in a sense this review is trying to say the literally unsayable — and what he’s saying might not fit with my proposed methodology. My pictures, if I made them as described above, wouldn’t be Crewdsons. So what is a Crewdson, really — what’s he trying to say? It’s impossible to make pictures even remotely resembling Crewdson’s or Hopper’s without a mention of Nighthawks. By the late 1980s, Crewdson had abandoned real-life situations to create still life and dioramas of natural environments, which he built in his studio and then photographed. Crewdson is one of eight artists featured in a group show at the V&A later this month, Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour, which also includes work by Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Boris Mikhailov. He is not the first photographer to be drawn to twilight - "nature at its most impressive", according to the exhibition catalogue - but his images are uniquely tense, pregnant with atmosphere. Edward Hopper, Ray Bradbury, The Twilight Zone, Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and David Lynch can all lay a claim to influence.