Gregory Crewdson

Cathedral of the Pines presents Gregory Crewdson’s first new body of work in over five years. The series marks a return to Crewdson’s classic style of storytelling via the single image, using light and color to create newly intimate, psychologically charged imagery. It also marks a time of transition for the artist, including a retreat from New York to a remote home and studio in western Massachusetts—a period of time during which Crewdson chose to remain socially withdrawn, instead committing to daily, long-distance, open-water swims and cross-country skiing on wooded paths. Cathedral of the Pines is named after one of these trails, deep in the forests of Becket, Massachusetts, the site where he found the inspiration to make these new pictures. It was there that he felt darkness lift, experienced a reconnection with his artistic process, and moved into a period of renewal and intense creative productivity. The photographs are accompanied by an essay by Alexander Nemerov, who addresses the work in relation to the American past, focusing in particular on the way the images draw space and time down to ceremonial points, in which "all that ever happened in these places seems crystallized in his tableaux, as if the quiet melancholy of Crewdson’s scenes gathered the unruly sorrows and other little-guessed feelings of people long gone who once stood on those spots."
Gregory Crewdson (born 1962) is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale School of Art, where he is now Director of Graduate Studies in Photography. His series Beneath the Roses is the subject of the 2012 documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. His work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe, including a survey that toured throughout Europe from 2001 to 2008. He is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York.

An acclaimed photographer with the eye of a filmmaker, Gregory Crewdson (born 1962) has created some of the most gorgeously haunting pictures in the history of the medium. His meticulously composed, large-scale images are stunning narratives of small-town American life--moviescapes crystallized into a single frame. While the photographs are staged with crews that rival many feature film productions, Crewdson takes inspiration as much from his own dreams and fantasies as the worlds of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Edward Hopper and Diane Arbus. Crewdson’s imagery has also infiltrated the pop culture landscape--including his inimitable Six Feet Under ads and Yo La Tengo album art. Shot over a decade with unprecedented access, Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters beautifully bares the artist’s process--and is as mesmerizing and riveting as the images themselves.

In the summer of 1996, Gregory Crewdson spent two solitary months at his family's cabin in Becket, Massachusetts. Using both small- and medium-format cameras, he obsessively photographed the fireflies that came alive at dusk each evening. Crewdson was drawn to the flickering lights, in part, by the underlying impossibility of capturing their elusive beauty in pictures. This luxurious volume, featuring 61 full-page tritone reproductions, calls to mind many of the hallmarks of Crewdson's oeuvre, from the sense of wonder in the nocturnal landscape, to the focus on light as a narrative event, to the fascination with nature as a psychological mystery. Although consistent in terms of their subject matter, these photographs demonstrate a wide scope of visual expression ranging from almost pure abstraction to more idyllic representations of the natural landscape.

Gregory Crewdson's photographic series capture a particularly American state of normalcy--in dissolution. The viewer, at first seduced by what appears to be an idyllic scene, soon discovers subtle off-kilter elements more akin to Film Noir than an NBC comedy. In a work from his Twilight series, yellow school buses are parked outside white wooden houses, and students stand and lounge around in seeming passivity. Something is happening--what, we don't know. The vision is familiar yet unfamiliar, seemingly benign yet threatening. Crewdson goes to great lengths in dramatizing his disturbing suburban scenes, employing elaborate lighting, cranes, props and extras, espousing a level of behind-the-scenes preparation more akin to the making of a Hollywood movie than the making of a still image. Here perhaps is one place to locate the eerie unreality and narrativity of his pictures, the creepy attention to detail so out of place, in the ordinary settings he evokes. Middle-class reality meets the other side of the normal here--by way of Sigmund Freud.