Gregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson
born 1962
American photographer. Crewdson obtained a BFA from the State University of New York Purchase, NY, and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT, where he completed his studies in 1988. Creating highly constructed photographs that deal with the duality of culture and nature, Crewdson presented his first major cycle of untitled photographs within the tradition of pictorial dioramas, under the heading Natural Wonder (1992–7). Working with installations he had made in his studio from backdrops and stuffed animals, Crewdson created open-ended ambiguous narratives that took the American suburban landscape as a model for anxiety and desire. Typically, animals are posed in uncanny and unnatural roles; one such work has a ring of eggs (mirroring monolithic structures) surrounded by a gathering of birds in some unknowable ritual (see 1999 exh. cat., p. 34). Taxidermy featured less in Crewdson’s later work, but he continued to explore his interest in pictorial framing. His Hover series of 1996–7 uses real suburban spaces where the strange incidents occur in a definite human context. Such incidents as fires, crop circles in back yards and neighbourly insanity are coolly observed, as if the inhabitants were occupying a para-normal goldfish bowl. A subsequent series, Twilight (1998) continues this theme, using a more filmic language. Such photographs as one featuring a woman kneeling in the centre of a soil- and flower-filled living room (see 1999 exh. cat., p. 108) directly relate to a scene from Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and create a sense of familiar unease. [Francis Summers. "Crewdson, Gregory." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T096755.]
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