Crewdson's epic photographic trilogy -- a portrait of America a decade in the making

Over the past three decades, Gregory Crewdson has been fleshing out a portrait of middle America, an America gazing wide-eyed at the glimmers of a fading dream.

His cinematographically staged photos have pieced together the fragments of a twilight world tinged with numbness.

This book brings togetherthree bodies of work made between 2012 and 2022. Envisaged as a trilogy, they previde unique insight into a decade of creation and offer a comprehensive view of the universe that hasposited Gregory Crewdson as one ofthe major figures of photography.

This trilogy isintroduced by Fireflies, a pivotal series if one is to grasp the intimate undercurrents in Gregory Crewdson's artwork.

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Considered one of the greatest exponents of staged photography, Gregory Crewdson has drawn a portrait of middle America, enclosed in the intermediate spaces of modest-sized cities, an America with eyes wide open towards the lights of a dream in exhaustion, already exhausted, already dilapidated. His photographs, staged with the devices of the cinema, have assembled the fragments of a twilight world, populated by the neutral faces of its protagonists, frozen like ruins that ignore themselves in a present cracked by the oracular manifestations of imperceptible decompositions.

This book brings together for the first time the trilogy conceived between 2012 and 2022. It unfolds an unprecedented vision of a decade of creation and reveals the intimate and political sides of the universe that has established Gregory Crewdson as one of photography’s major figures. Cathedral of the Pines and An Eclipse of Moths vibrate with an intimacy crystallized by places deeply connected to the life of the photographer, his partner and collaborator Juliane Hiam and their children. At the same time, these two series shift towards a political dimension which finds its most subtle expression in the black and white photographs of Eveningside which close the trilogy in 2022. To this trilogy is added the Fireflies series, produced in 1996, which is essential for capturing the intimate movements that operate in his art.

A lively introduction to and history of international contemporary art from 1960 to the present

What does it mean?
Is it really art?
Why does it cost so much?
While these questions are perpetually asked about contemporary art, they are not the questions that E. H. Gombrich set out to answer in his seminal book The Story of Art. Contemporary art is very different from what came before. From the 1960s, where Gombrich’s account concludes, artists began to abandon traditional forms of art and started to make work that questioned art’s very definition. This is where Godfrey picks up the story.

Developments in contemporary art have followed no straightforward line of progress or sequence of movements. Recognizing this, Tony Godfrey creates a narrative from a series of often dramatic creative conflicts and arguments around what art is or should be. From object versus sculpture and painting versus conceptual to local versus global, gallery versus wider world, The Story of Contemporary Art traces a history in terms of drastic changes in social and political life over the last sixty years.

How do we experience being human in a world that seems to change so quickly? In exploring art’s relationship to this question, Godfrey asserts that multiple voices must be heard: critics, theorists, curators and collectors, but also audiences and artists themselves. Key to the book is the story of how a perception that art was made almost exclusively by white men from North America and Western Europe has been radically overturned. Compelling and intelligent, but never academic, this book tells us how.

About the Author:

Tony Godfrey, former Programme Director of the MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute, London, now lives in Manila, where he works as a curator with artists from South-East Asia. He has written for the Burlington Magazine and Art in America, and is the author of Conceptual Art and Painting Today, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues.