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. Crewdson regularly works with crews of 30 or more people to construct complicated sets and lighting setups. He has his own director of photography, storyboard/concept artists, photo editor and he doesn’t even operate the camera himself. Vision From America: Photographs From the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940-2001, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA He explores the space where fiction and reality meet. Just as we have seen in horror movies in recent years - Hereditary, Midsommar and especially It follows, which must be inspired by Crewdsons work.

In his images, Crewdson reworks the American suburb into a stage-set for inexplicable, often disturbing, events that usually take place at twilight. Working on an epic scale, Crewdson has developed a process akin to the making of a feature film to create what he calls ‘frozen moments’, with the help of a large crew to shoot and then develop the images in post-production. Over the next months, three galleries in London, New York and Beverly Hills will be showing Beneath the Roses, Gregory Crewdson's latest suite of 20 large-scale colour photographs. They have been constructed and shot using the technical resources of the movie industry. A roster of actors, lighting crews, best boys, grips, gaffers, art directors, set dressers, sound-stage crews, hair and makeup people collaborated in their production. In the process, the main streets of several small towns in Vermont and Massachusetts were shut down, sets were constructed on soundstages, actors hired. Fourteen of the images from Beneath the Roses are currently at London's White Cube.

Beneath the Roses

Settings and Players: Theatrical Ambiguity in American Photography, White Cube, London, England and The City Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me.”

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. Several of Crewdson's students are now successful photographers in their own right. Teaching, he says, is ideal for an artist because he gets to learn what the next generation are doing, what they're reading, what they're listening to, and to talk about form and composition. "It's so rare that you actually do that as an artist," he says. "We end up talking about everything else -galleries, the market. Everything but the art itself." We Love Painting, The American Contempororay Art from Misumi Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan 2002 New Work 6: Gregory Crewdson, Twilight, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (solo)

Making Eveningside (2022) – short interpretive documentary directed by Harper Glantz, set to original music by Stuart Bogie and James Murphy (electronic musician) about the making of Eveningside The large-format camera helps capture all the detail for his huge 7ft gallery prints.His images are enhanced digitally in photoshop and sometimes stitched together before printing. Gregory Crewdson: In a Lonely Place" at Det Kongelige bibliotek". Archived from the original on December 19, 2011 . Retrieved December 28, 2011.

Everything's Gone Green Photography and the Garden, The Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradfort, England This new body of photographs concludes Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses series. The full series was published in a book by Abrams, with an essay by Russell Banks, in conjunction with the exhibition.Gregory Crewdson. House Taken Over, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, 1998; and traveled to Salamanca, 1999 [34] It is also an extraordinarily expensive way to make art. The productions are under-written by the three galleries that represent Crewdson, but he won’t get specific about what it cost to produce these 32 images, saying only that his line producer is quite strict. Still, any suggestion that Wall Street’s travails may take a bite out of the contemporary-art-market mania turns him pale: “Of course I worry about that!” Kroll, Justin (October 26, 2017). "Scarlett Johansson in Talks to Star in Focus Drama 'Reflective Light' ". 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.” 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.

The last section of the book is made up of production stills, lighting plots, and Polaroid snaps documenting the location shoots. Smoke and fog and snow machines fill up the atmosphere and lighting reaches four stories into the air. Architectural plans and set drawings are included for the soundstage shots. Interestingly, the incidental actor on scene looks as heartbroken candid as posed.

Selected Works

Crewdson produces large-scale, elaborately constructed photographs taken in and around the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where the Crewdson family has forever had a small log cabin in the woods. He has just completed a series of 32 new photographs called “Beneath the Roses,” some of which will be shown at the Luhring Augustine gallery beginning this week. Thematically, “Beneath the Roses” is a lot like “Twilight,” the series that launched Crewdson into the photographic big (up to six-figures-a-picture) leagues. In both, ordinary people in ordinary places are surreally and beautifully lit, and there’s an unease to everything, a suggestion of something lurking just outside, underneath, or possibly within the frame. Even at their most lush, Crewdson photographs are epically lonely. “There are two possible interpretations,” he says of his work. “One is the possibility of impossibility and two is the impossibility of possibility. I know there’s a sadness in my pictures. There’s this want to connect to something larger, and then the impossibility of doing so.” Complicit! Contemporary American Art & Mass Culture, University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, USA