Product Description

Crewdson's most recent series of photographs, Twilight, are created as elaborately constructed film stills, catching the mysterious moment of time between before and after, revealing unknowable or unimaginable aspects of domestic reality. A cow lies on its back on the lawn between two houses while firemen secure the area and a man searches the sky. Could the cow have rained down from above? In another image stacks and stacks of inedible slices of bread - bearing an odd resemblance to the mysterious monoliths at Stonehenge - are watched over by a gathering of birds. Both entirely foreign and oddly familiar, these images are carefully orchestrated events that challenge our very notions of familiarity, undermining our sense of certainty. These eerie and evocative photographs pair beauty with horror, obsession with disgust, and the real with the surreal, suggesting narratives open to endless interpretations. The book includes an essay written by fiction writer Rick Moody. The book and exhibitions are comprised of the forty images from his Twilight series which was begun in 1998 - these exhibitions and this book chronicle the completion of the series and mark the first time it will be seen in its entirety.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20840 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 112 pages

Customer Reviews

A window on a weird world
A bizarre look into one man's warped mind. True - there are overtones of Lynchian suburbia which are heightened by the netherlight that permiates these worlds - but on the whole this is a stunning collection of original photographs. The book gives an insight into how each shot was staged and the large amount of work behind the scenes that the casual observer would not appreciate. Four years for a roll's worth of film is impressive in itself. Having seen the large prints hanging on the wall of the White Cube2 gallery in Hoxton, some of the impact is lost in small coffee-table sizing, but the subjects still stun with their outlandishness. Strange and unsettling - all the things that good art should be.

2.5 stars.
I saw Gregory Crewdson on a TV documentary briefly and that's the only reason I bought this book... just to see what his work is all about.

I am slightly disappointed to be honest. I like the surreal and threatening nature of some of his work but some photos leave me cold, especially the ones involving overhead views of school buses and fire engines etc. However, that is just my personal preference.

Some people dislike the quality of the reproduction in the book. I think it is fine. You can never replicate the quality of a large format print in a book. The print quality is fine with all necessary detail included.

By far the worst part of this book is the essay on Crewdson by Rick Moody. I am not exaggerating when I say that it is the most pompous and ridiculous piece of writing I think I have ever read. I really think Moody must have been either on the verge of insanity or under the influence of something otherworldly when penning this claptrap. He comes across as someone who is thumbing through a thesaurus as he writes, attemting to bamboozle the reader with his supposed vocabulary and literacy skills. The only reason I chose to finish reading the entire essay was to try and fathom out what on earth he was attempting to say.

Thankfully, the essay isn't really what this book is all about. It's about the photographs. I am now of the opinion that Crewdson is more famous for his way of working (huge road crew and Hollywood style entourage) than he is for the end result of his work. Much of this work is good but overrated. Crewdson is not a God-like figure like many will have you believe. He is just a modern art photographer with a fat wallet, that's all.

Good book, worth flicking through then throwing on the coffee table for guests to puzzle over.

The Uncanny Encapsulated
In Crewdson's Twilight series, he has managed to create a beautiful set of photographs that are so packed with narrative that each image tells a story in a single frame.

Many of the images, at first glance, appear to be fairly normal scenes from somewhere in the American Midwest. However, after looking at them again, you will see more and more detail. The deeper you comprehend each image, the more unsettling it becomes, and yet there is not anything in these images to shock or horrify. There is only a pervading sense of something else unexplained going on outside the confines of the photograph.

Crewdson has received praise and scorn in equal measure from people I know in the photography world. However, the latter has always seemed to me to be out of jealousy over the monumental effort (and finances) most of these images took to produce.

They are beautiful and very detailed. The most unsettling thing about them is that you don't really know why they make you feel unsettled.