Gregory Crewdson: Eveningside

Exceptionally devoted to creating the most visually striking and mysterious photograph possible, Gregory Crewdson is an innovator in large-scale photography.

He has developed a distinct artistic language over the last three decades — exploring intriguing fictions and his uncanny imagination through hand-constructed dioramas, staged subjects, intricately-crafted interiors, cinematic lighting, special effects, and carefully-selected natural and urban landscapes in the Northeastern United States.

Each image in Crewdson’s latest series Eveningside is fabricated with expansive production teams and lighting crews akin to those used in cinematography. Unlike theatrical films, Crewdson’s finished photographs capture only one small moment of a fictional event, never divulging what occurred before or after. At the core of Crewdson’s work, it is essential that the implications behind each image remain unrestricted, that each viewer experiences the picture with their own narratives.

The Taubman Museum of Art is pleased to exhibit a selection of works from Eveningside (2021-2022), a series of black-and-white photographs depicting the unassuming residents of a surreal American town. In this series, Crewdson uses light and tone to create images with melancholic atmospheres that connect with traditions of black-and-white photography and the history of film noir. The images reveal the photographer’s ongoing interest in the intersections of loneliness and beauty, unexpected wonder, and peculiarity of everyday life.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Gregory Crewdson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale School of Art, where he is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography. His career as an artist spans more than three decades. His methodology of making still images with a cinematic lighting and production team has brought together the languages of photography and cinema, and is referenced widely in film, television, and other visual forms. His major bodies of work include Natural Wonder (1992–1997), Twilight (1998-2002), Dream House (2002), Beneath the Roses (2003-2008), Cathedral of the Pines (2013–2014), An Eclipse of Moths (2018-2019), and the recently released Eveningside (2021-2022). His work is in the collections of museums and has been exhibited extensively worldwide.

Crewdson is a recipient of the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship. He has published more than a dozen books of photographs including Hover (Artspace Books), Dream of Life (University of Salamanca, Spain), Twilight (Harry N. Abrams), Beneath the Roses (Harry N. Abrams), Gregory Crewdson: 1985 to 2005 (Hatje Cantz), Sanctuary (Harry N. Abrams), Gregory Crewdson, a catalogue raisonné, (Rizzoli), and, all with Aperture: Cathedral of the Pines, An Eclipse of Moths, and Alone Street. His most recent books are Eveningside (Skira) and Gregory Crewdson (Prestel). He lives and works in western Massachusetts.