Beneath the Roses: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson

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Text: “Re-Pressentation” chapter from Marcus Bunyan’s PhD research ‘Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male’, RMIT University, Melbourne,2001 Lubow, Arthur (August 20, 2020). "For Gregory Crewdson, Truth Lurks in the Landscape". The New York Times. He balances reality and dream. Because it is dreamy, but also so ordinary that you do not know if it is a nightmare or just a surreal reality. The photographs are feverish, full of unknowing desires, eerie and beautiful. Still, at a certain time, toward nightfall on certain days of the year, Crewdson is obliged to make pictures. His apparent composure and good nature is sorely tested on set, he says. As the light fades, there are often problems - with neighbours, the weather, unexpected interruptions. "I never think we're going to make it," he says. In the intimate photographs of Fireflies, Crewdson portrays the mating ritual of fireflies at dusk, capturing the tiny insects’ transient moments of light as they illuminate the summer night. Unlike the theatrical scale of the Beneath the Roses and Sanctuary series, Fireflies is a quiet meditation on the nature of light and desire, as the images reflect not only upon the fleeting movements of the insects in their intricate mating ritual, but upon the notion of photography itself, in capturing a single ephemeral moment.

Mechling, Lauren (October 28, 2022). "Inside a Brooklyn Apartment Where the Walls Talk". Town and Country. Schwiegershausen, Erica (July 19, 2016). "How Gregory Crewdson Spends His Summer". The New York Times. In the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman began taking a series of photographs in which she re-created the promotional stills from Hollywood B-movies. When the photographer Gregory Crewdson was growing up, in Park Slope, his psychoanalyst father’s office was in the basement of the family’s brownstone. Crewdson and his siblings were told to ignore the stream of grown-ups who marched hourly through the house, even if they were outside, playing on the stoop, and wound up face-to-face with one. But sometimes he’d lie on the wide planks of the living-room floor and wonder about conversations below. “I always tried to imagine what I heard and make pictures out of it in my mind,” Crewdson says. He is 46 now, with two kids of his own and a longish wave of graying hair. He’s recently begun seeing a therapist whose office is directly below his Greenwich Village studio, and yes, they’ve discussed what that means.This show opened concurrently with exhibitions at Luhring Augustine, New York and Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, CA. A mid-career survey of Crewdson's work opened at the Kunstverein Hannover in September 2005 and travelled to Landesgalerie Linz, Austria; the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum Krefeld, Germany; and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. Imperfect Innocence, The Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, USA But then comes the brief period the artist considers perfect twilight. "There's really only a five-minute span where everything lines up. It's the witching hour. The wind dies down and everything becomes still." In that moment anything, a leaf blowing around, is a disruption to a perfect world. "I'm attracted to twilight as much for the stillness as for the light," he finally considers. "It's a moment of perfection. I love that moment. Actually, I live for it". Drawing on Hopper: Gregory Crewdson/Edward Hopper, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, USA (solo)

Crewdson produces large-scale, elaborately constructed photographs taken in and around the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where the Crewdson family has forever had a small log cabin in the woods. He has just completed a series of 32 new photographs called “Beneath the Roses,” some of which will be shown at the Luhring Augustine gallery beginning this week. Thematically, “Beneath the Roses” is a lot like “Twilight,” the series that launched Crewdson into the photographic big (up to six-figures-a-picture) leagues. In both, ordinary people in ordinary places are surreally and beautifully lit, and there’s an unease to everything, a suggestion of something lurking just outside, underneath, or possibly within the frame. Even at their most lush, Crewdson photographs are epically lonely. “There are two possible interpretations,” he says of his work. “One is the possibility of impossibility and two is the impossibility of possibility. I know there’s a sadness in my pictures. There’s this want to connect to something larger, and then the impossibility of doing so.” I Never Thought What You Were Telling Me Was True or a Product of Your Imagination, Galeria Estrany De La Mota, Barcelona, Spain In a career that spans more than three decades, Crewdson has produced several widely acclaimed bodies of work including Natural Wonder (1997), Twilight (2002),and Dream House (2008). The exhibition at the Frieder Burda Museum presents about 30 figures by Duane Hanson, mainly from the artist’s estate, in dialogue with 20 large format works from the series Beneath the Roses by the photographer Gregory Crewdson. The photographies are mainly owned by the artist himself. Crewdson lives primarily in western Massachusetts in a former Methodist church. [23] His partner, Juliane Hiam, [24] is a writer and producer [25] and the two work closely together. [26] Hiam has also appeared as a subject in numerous of Crewdson's pictures. [27] [28] He has two children, Lily and Walker, from a previous marriage to Ivy Shapiro. [29] Crewdson is an open-water swimmer [30] and has said that the meditative state he achieves with his daily swimming practice is fundamental to his creative process as an artist. [31] Publications [ edit ]Exhibition: ‘Golden Valley Faces: The photographs of Richard Jenkins’ at the Café Gallery, Hay Castle,Hay-on-Wye Vision From America: Photographs From the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940-2001, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA Everything's Gone Green Photography and the Garden, The Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradfort, England Famed photographer Gregory Crewdson will present the inaugural discussion in a series sponsored by the Photography Society of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City…