Gregory Crewdson

American, b. 1962, New York; lives and works in New York

Gregory Crewdson stages his photographs in much the same way that a ilm would be shot, using elaborately built sets, dramatic lighting, cranes, props, and professional actors. He uses these grand productions to tell stories about small-town American life, which are both strange and familiar. In Lee, Massachusetts, where his parents had a cabin, Crewdson began his Natural Wonder series (1992–1997) that depicts birds, insects, and torn body parts in brightly colored, surreal, domestic settings. In Hover (1996–1997), the artist took aerial black-and-white photographs of strange events set in the streets and lawns of Lee, from an inexplicable circle in a family’s backyard to rows of lowers being planted in the middle of a road. Dream House (2002) delves even further into the darker side of suburban life. This ambitious project was made in Rutland, Vermont, in a home where a woman had died four years earlier but in which all of the family’s possessions remained intact. He used more recognizable actors in this series than in ear- lier works—Gwyneth Paltrow, Tilda Swinton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, and William H. Macy—but that celebrity is used to confound our expectations of the characters they portray. Although the work conveys the voyeurism associated with photography, the carefully posed photographs also reference a tradition of Realist painting in America by artists such as Grant Wood and Edward Hopper. Crewdson’s work has been exhibited widely and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Broad Family Collection, Santa Monica, California; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.