Twilight chronicles the art of photographer Gregory Crewdson’s gallery exhibitions of his fantastic, creative images.
“Crewdson is at the forefront of a movement in contemporary photography that has abandoned realism in pursuit of pure cinematic fantasy.”—New York Times Magazine
Twilight: in that zone between the certainty of day and fear of the dark, Gregory Crewdson sets his eerie, enigmatic photographs. A woman floats in her flooded living room; a cow appears to have fallen from the sky onto a front lawn; a gang of teenagers, seemingly hypnotized, pile up household objects for a bonfire. Created as elaborately staged tableaux, this series of images suggests the bizarre yet beautiful surrealities behind deceptively familiar suburban facades.
Including both production stills and the 40 finished images, all in full color, this volume features an essay by Pushcart Prize–winning author Rick Moody, a novelist equally renowned for exposing the underbelly of small-town, middle-class America.
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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.