Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson

Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson Overview

"Crewdson is at the forefront of a movement in contemporary photography that has abandoned realism in pursuit of pure cinematic fantasy." —The New York Times Magazine

Twilight: in that zone between the certainty of day and fear of the dark, Gregory Crewdson sets his eerie, enigmatic photographs. A woman floats in her flooded living room, a cow appears to have fallen from the sky onto a front lawn, a gang of teenagers, seemingly hypnotized, pile up household objects for a bonfire. Created as elaborately staged tableaux, this series of images suggests the bizarre yet beautiful surrealities behind deceptively familiar suburban facades. Scheduled to accompany three simultaneous gallery exhibitions in Spring 2002 and a subsequent retrospective at Mass MoCA, this book chronicles the completion of the Twilight series, which Crewdson began in 1998. Including both production stills and the 40 finished images, all in full color, it also features an essay by Rick Moody, a novelist equally renowned for exposing the underbelly of small-town, middle-class America.

Customer Reviews

Hearing the word twilight makes many of us think of the time of day when ordinary things undergo awkward or extraordinary transitions. It is the mysterious frame of time after sunset, but before dawn. The dictionary describes it as half-light, final period of the day. It is the fine line between what is real and what is an illusion. Twilight by Gregory Crewdson captures exactly that.

Crewdson brings the world of photography to the essence of cinema as each photo shoot is intensely staged with large crews working diligently to create the sets for each photograph. Many photography enthusiasts believe that Crewdsons work is overrated and overpaid, but in his work, the ideas of these images speak louder than most photographers of the contemporary art world today. Each image Crewdson creates functions as an intensely dramatic moment with a multitude of focal points in which the narrative is constructed.

He focuses on subject matter that intrigues, confuses, and surprises his viewers. In most of Crewdson's images, a single figure is isolated giving a strong sense of despair, loneliness and even guilt. In one image, a typical suburban father is in a state of confusion as he sits in mounds of sod in his bedroom. Another shows a young woman floating in a lucid daze as her living room floods. The fact that the ideas of supernatural like encounters combined with the American suburban lifestyle evokes a rather dark and sinister feeling.

Aesthetically, Crewdson's images combine a crisp, crystal clear optical quality with a soft, calm color palette. Most of the photographs contain cool dark blues with streaks of warm yellows beaming across the image giving them that chiaroscuro effect. These colors intensify the drama of each subject. The brilliant tungsten yellows capture the attention of the viewer whereas the serene blues create an easy to view atmosphere.

Page after page of the 40-photograph set will have you closely examining each detail in Crewdsons images. Each photograph digs deep into the realm of the unknown, the untold, and displays an eerie, yet intimate scenario of suburban life with an extreme twist of the supernatural. To get the full appreciation of the wonderfully weird subject matter, one must let their eyes explore each image in depth.

In my opinion, this is an excellent body of work. I enjoy the surreal quality of the photographs paired with the terror that hides within everyday life. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the work of Gregory Crewdson.

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