lasting impression on Crewdson and helped shape
his concept of photographic truth.
As an art student at State University of New York
at Purchase from 1981 to 1985, Crewdson studied
photography in a suburban community, an environ-
ment that would later serve as the focal point for the
majority of his images. During this period, he
worked atAperturemagazine and did an internship
at the Daniel Wolf Gallery in Manhattan. It was at
this point that he met Joel Sternfeld, whose photo-
graphs of the American landscape he greatly
admired, along with those of William Eggleston,
Robert Frank, and the paintings of Edward Hopper.
Like these artists, Crewdson developed his aes-
thetic and artistic technique in response to place. A
primary source of inspiration is the natural land-
scape of western Massachusetts where his family
purchased a tract of land on which to build a log
cabin when he was a teenager. This area of pristine
terrain, which lies adjacent to towns of vinyl siding
and subdivisions, has served as a retreat for
Crewdson throughout his career. It has also pro-
vided him with a model of American life in which
an ideal nature collides with ever-encroaching
urban blight.
Crewdson first began to photograph suburban
life while working on his Master of Fine Arts thesis
at Yale University between 1986 and 1988, asking
local residents from the nearby town of Lee, Mas-
sachusetts to participate in a series of theatrically
composed genre scenes. Crewdson orchestrated
disquieting, ambiguous situations located within
his subjects’ homes, with the aim of capturing a
furtive moment that usually goes unnoticed.
Crewdson acknowledges that this split second,
what he calls ‘‘the uncanny aspect of the photo-
graph,’’ is fleeting (Moody 2002). To capture this
moment, Crewdson needed to gain greater control
over the arrangement and lighting of his composi-
tions. In the late 1980s, he abandoned real life situa-
tions to create still-lifes and dioramas of natural
environments, which he built in his studio and
then photographed. Crewdson tightened his focus
to feature animals and birds as the protagonists in
these vivid, color photographs, which he titled the
Natural Wonderseries (1989), thus creating star-
tling scenes of macabre moments in the underbrush.
The use of minutely detailed, constructed envir-
onments, staged events, and theatrical lighting to
reveal the unknown aspects of his subjects’ lives
recurs throughout Crewdson’s work. Crewdson
cites numerous film directors and several films
among his strongest influences. These include
David Cronenberg, David Lynch, and Alfred
Hitchcock, whose 1958 psychological thrillerVer-
tigo,together with Steven Spielberg’s paranormal
film,Close Encounters of the Third Kind(1977),
stimulated Crewdson’s interest in combining every-
day reality with the extraordinary. Often compared
to a movie director himself, Crewdson presents a
complete yet ambiguous narrative within one
photograph, condensing an entire movie into a
single frame.
In the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman began taking a
series of photographs in which she re-created the
promotional stills from Hollywood B-movies.
Photographing herself as an actress, a housewife,
a prostitute and the like, she created new arche-
types from well-honed film stereotypes. In the
1990s, photographers like Crewdson and Jeff Wall
expanded on Sherman’s concept, creating extensive
and elaborate staged tableaux in which they too
created a new fiction by subjecting ordinary
North American life to intense scrutiny.
Crewdson regularly works with crews of 30 or
more production assistants and technicians to fab-
ricate intricate sets and lighting designs, often
installed within a rural, suburban environment.
In theTwilght series (1998–2002), for example,
which includes 40 large-format, untitled photo-
graphs, Crewdson transformed a quiet neighbor-
hood street lined with 1950s-style houses into a
bustling film set. Photographed at the twilight
hour, when both natural and artificial lights are
available, these pictures present a hybrid space
that is at once real and invented.
Despite the enormous scope of his productions,
Crewdson’s carefully composed scenes and con-
trolled lighting recall the intricate arrangements of
early photographic still lifes. In nineteenth century
daguerreotypes, for example, objects were positioned
with a scientific sensitivity to depth of field and the
play of light and shadow within a composition.
Crewdson maintains this traditional approach to
photography but magnifies it to the largest possible
scale. In this way, he turns the real world into a
fictional stage, creating complex images of a choreo-
graphed reality. As a professor of photography at
Yale University since 1994, Crewdson has pro-
foundly influenced a group of artists who combine
documentary photography with fictional, staged ele-
ments. Crewdson summarizes his aesthetic vision as
follows: ‘‘In part I see what I’m doing as exploring
the American psyche through the American verna-
cular landscape’’ (Grant, 2004). Rather than pas-
sively observe the world and record the reality he
encounters, Crewdson actively creates a world as he
imagines it and photographs it for us to see.
LindsayHarrisCREWDSON, GREGORY