Gregory Crewdson

"Beneath the Roses" contains the complete set of images from Gregory Crewdson's new series of photographs, made between 2003 and 2007. As in his earlier "Twilight" series, each elaborately choreographed image depicts an emotionally heightened moment in which something very important (although we never quite know what) seems to have happened or is about to happen. Like film stills from unmade movies, these photographs portray mysterious unknowable stories which are reduced to a single, static, highly charged image. This book also includes source materials, production photographs, lighting charts, sketches and architectural plans, which give the viewer a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of his elaborately staged photographs.

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.

Alone Street brings together two major bodies of work by Gregory Crewdson, Cathedral of the Pines (Aperture, 2016) and An Eclipse of Moths (Aperture, 2020), in a single, elegant, and affordable monograph. Both series expand on the artist's obsessive exploration of the psychogeography of small-town, post-industrial New England and underscore the precision and depth of Crewdson's unique mode of photographic storytelling. In each image, light, color, and carefully crafted scenography evoke the feeling that, as art historian Alexander Nemerov has astutely described, "all that ever happened in these places seems crystallized in his tableaux, as if the quiet melancholy of Crewdson's scenes gathered the unruly sorrows and other little-guessed feelings of people long-gone who once stood on those spots." In addition to the full set of images from each series, Alone Street, presents a selection of behind-the-scenes images and storyboards, revealing the extensive preparation and planning that went into the making of each work.