Beneath the Roses: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson

Product Information

Born in Brooklyn in 1962, Crewdson has been taking still pictures that use complex cinematic techniques for twenty years. Working with set designers and lighting artists on sound stages and on the streets of rural towns in Vermont and Massachusetts, the prints are large (64 x 94), the colors glossy, the themes operatic. Commentators always bring up the fact that Crewdson's father was a psychoanalyst, and that the artist always wondered what went on in the basement office of the family's Brooklyn brownstone. The kids were told that if they passed a patient they recognised in the street, they should pretend not to know them. His father once took young Gregory, a boy of 10, to a Diane Arbus show, and never told him why. Crewdson's interest in the unhinged and inexplicable is compelling, but comes across too often as theatrical and strained, as in Victorian paintings. If Crewdson's images sometimes have the quality of primal scenes and traumas, they are also like half-remembered scenes from movies, which the mind has both embellished and incorporated into autobiography, as if these witnessed fictions had become part of one's own life. I think he'd like his images to be as indelible for us, and for us to concoct our own stories from them. But there's only so much you can take. Pass the pills and cigarettes, I'm staying home tonight. Stereographs: Rose Stereoscopic Views of Victorian Contingents leaving for the Boer War in South Africa,1899-1900

I didn’t start taking pictures until I was in college. I had a crush on a girl who was photo major, and followed her into a photography class. My Photography teacher was Laurie Simmons, and my crush went from the girl to my teacher. As soon as I took my first pictures, my crush shifted from the teacher to photography. Gregory Crewdson Behind Closed Doors, Collectors Celebrate The Museum's Golden Anniversary, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, USA Festival and exhibitions: ‘What Makes Us Human? Image in the Age of A.I.’ at the PhotoVogue Festival, BASE Milano,MilanA Thousand Hounds. A Walk with the Dogs Through the History of Photography, UBS PaineWebber Art Gallery, New York, USA Exhibition: ‘Golden Valley Faces: The photographs of Richard Jenkins’ at the Café Gallery, Hay Castle,Hay-on-Wye Text: “Re-Pressentation” chapter from Marcus Bunyan’s PhD research ‘Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male’, RMIT University, Melbourne,2001

Merchant’s Row, above, is the first of the 49 plates in the book, and is one of its finest. The colors are wonderful. A pregnant woman stands frozen on the zebra stripes at an intersection; apart from her and one car waiting for the perpetually yellow lights — yellow lights in intersections is one recurring theme in the book — the scene is devoid of people. The street recedes into early morning fog in the distance. Across the street is a pregnancy center, but you can’t make that out in the small reproduction here. Archivo Pons Artxiboa, Erakusketa - Exposicion, 45.zk.No.45, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastian, Spain Alone Street. New York: Aperture, 2021. ISBN 978-1597115131. With an essay by Joyce Carol Oates and an interview with the artist by Cate Blanchett. He balances reality and dream. Because it is dreamy, but also so ordinary that you do not know if it is a nightmare or just a surreal reality. The photographs are feverish, full of unknowing desires, eerie and beautiful. Everything's Gone Green Photography and the Garden, The Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradfort, EnglandPhotography Portfolio I & II, Paula Cooper, Carolina Nitsch & The Merce Cunningham Dace Co., Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA 2006 Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (solo) 2005 Gregory Crewdson: 1985-2005, Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover, Germany (solo) I think that's where many draw the David Lynch clutch - a small town life where dreamy things happen - but I think all the more about Cindy Sherman. When I was 10, my father brought me to a Diane Arbus exhibition. He was a psychoanalyst and those pictures have a certain psychological quality, so somehow I made a connection between what he did as a job and Arbus looking for secrets. It wasn’t like I decided I was going to be a photographer exactly then. But that was the first time I understood the power of photographs and so I probably filed that away somewhere as a defining memory. Gregory Crewdson: Disturbed Nature, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art Design, Vancouver, Canada (solo) Crewdson’s working method is often compared to a movie director, but instead of telling a story in 130,000 frames, he condenses the story into a single frame.

A survey of Crewdson’s work of the previous twenty years toured European museums from 2005 to 2008. The exhibition In a Lonely Place traveled to galleries and museums across Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand from 2011 to 2013, and a major monograph was published by Rizzoli in 2013. Crewdson’s awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship. Crowther’s review first published in The New York Times, April 20, 1961. In Fava and Vigano, 105 quoted in Anon. “La Dolce Vita,” on Wikipedia Footnote 30 [Online] Cited 20/10/2012. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dolce_Vita In a career that spans more than three decades, Crewdson has produced several widely acclaimed bodies of work including Natural Wonder (1997), Twilight (2002),and Dream House (2008).Still, at a certain time, toward nightfall on certain days of the year, Crewdson is obliged to make pictures. His apparent composure and good nature is sorely tested on set, he says. As the light fades, there are often problems - with neighbours, the weather, unexpected interruptions. "I never think we're going to make it," he says.

I’m only concerned with that particular moment, the moment of the picture. I really don’t have any interest in what happens before, or what happens after. In a certain way, it’s a privilege that I don’t have to think about plot, or storyline, or character development, that I can just focus on that moment, and how to make that moment as beautiful and as mysterious as possible. The Stills Director Movie review: 'Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters' of art in progress". Los Angeles Times. March 8, 2013 . Retrieved October 5, 2023. But then comes the brief period the artist considers perfect twilight. "There's really only a five-minute span where everything lines up. It's the witching hour. The wind dies down and everything becomes still." In that moment anything, a leaf blowing around, is a disruption to a perfect world. "I'm attracted to twilight as much for the stillness as for the light," he finally considers. "It's a moment of perfection. I love that moment. Actually, I live for it". Luhring Augustine is pleased to present Beneath the Roses, an exhibition of 20 new large-scale photographs by Gregory Crewdson. In these pointedly theatrical yet intensely real panoramic images, Crewdson explores the recesses of the American psyche and the disturbing dramas at play within quotidian environments.

The way Sherman's staged scenes were an innovation. During the 1970s, she began recreating stills from Hollywood movies, taking photographs of herself as a housewife, prostitute, etc. During the 1990s, photographers such as Crewdson began to develop Sherman's concept and created his own stills where he exposed the middle class in American small towns to scrutiny. I wish I had Gregory Crewdson’s budget and team. I envy him. I really do. I bet he has a bunch of fun thinking up the scenarios and then making the pictures happen together with his light crew, his casting people, his camera operator and director of photography (!), his actors, and so on. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with his mode of working per se, so long as its limitations are known; you can’t get reality from fiction, but then again, if literary fiction can be more true to reality than documentaries, couldn’t photographic fiction? Shouldn’t we value photographic fiction for the same reasons we value literary fiction? Yes, we should. But what I’d do with his budget is this: I’d come up with an idea. I’d build the scene every bit as rigorously as Crewdson. I’d micromanage just as much as him. I’d put a hundred lights in the scene, I’d use a huge camera that could almost capture the atoms in the nose hair of my actors. But! Then I’d do what Crewdson doesn’t dare or doesn’t want: I’d introduce spontaneity. Mechling, Lauren (October 28, 2022). "Inside a Brooklyn Apartment Where the Walls Talk". Town and Country.