Twilight: Photographs By Gregory Crewdson

Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson

Twilight is the magic hour when ordinary routines undergo strange transformations. Gregory Crewdson's Twilight series, begun in 1998 and completed in 2002, consists of forty photographs created as elaborately staged large-scale tableaux that explore the domestic landscape and its relationship to an artificially heightened natural world. The collision between the normal and the paranormal in these narrative images produces a tension that serves to transform the topology of the suburban landscape into a place of wonder and anxiety.As Rick Moody suggests in his essay, Crewdson seems preocupied with "the resection of the suburban ideal, where dream strategies, like condensation and displacement, the action of metaphor, undergird the here and now." Moody's essay reveals as much as it withholds, suggesting the ways that life and memory can be points of entry into art.From Library JournalTwilight, that indistinct time between day and night, is an appropriate title for the latest and most substantial monograph by photographer Crewdson (after 1999's Dream of Life and 1998's Hover). Continuing his tradition of photographing cinematically staged and darkened realities of suburban life, Crewdson presents characters who exist in a world where American Beauty meets The X-Files. This volume's 40 images, which were inspired by Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, were created much like a feature film; the production crew included lighting supervisors, pyrotechnic experts, interior designers, and bug wranglers. Crewdson's fabricated realities contradict the traditional photographic adage of the "decisive moment." In using this method, he demonstrates that the camera can do much more than capture a moment in time, thus placing this work in the vanguard of contemporary art photography. The book begins with an essay by novelist Moody and ends with production stills and credits. Recommended for all public and academic collections. Shauna Frischkorn, Millersville Univ. Lib., PACopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.About the AuthorRick Moody is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories, including Demonology, Purple America, and The Ice Storm. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper's, among other publications. He lives on Fishers Island, New York.