“Every photographer has one story to tell.”

For Gregory Crewdson, that story lies in the drama, pathos, and poignancy of our everyday lives. Since the mid-1980s, Crewdson has constructed spellbinding tableaux set in the majestic expanse of the New England landscape to explore the ambiguities, anxieties, and paradoxes of contemporary American life. Deftly blending elements of auteur cinema, old master painting, staged photography, and mid-20th century realism, Crewdson’s large-scale pictures are produced as one would make a film, but rather than tell a story over time, it is told in single images.

Gregory Crewdson, the catalogue for a major exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna, brings togethers nine groups of work that unfolds as a tender meditation on the American Dream deferred. Conceived serially, the retrospective charts the artist’s formal and conceptual explorations over the last three and a half decades, creating an intricate map of obsessions, fears, and desires that lurk just beneath the surface. Like painter Edward Hopper, photographer Walker Evans, filmmaker David Lynch, and novelist Raymond Carver, Crewdson is attuned to exquisite frisson of modern life bringing to mind the words of fellow New Englander, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Gregory Crewdson features more than 300 photographs from the artist’s best known series including Twilight (1998-2002) and Beneath the Roses (2003-2008), as well as the recently completed trilogy that explores the fragility, emptiness, alienation, and loss of social decline in Cathedral of the Pines (2013-2014), An Eclipse of Moths (2018-2019), and Eveningside (2021-2022).

The catalogue also features Production Stills made between 1991-2022 a full chronology of Crewdson’s life and work, and texts by author and exhibition curator Walter Moser, as well as Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Matthieu Orléan, David Fincher, Beate Hofstadler, Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, and Emily St. John Mandel. Published in cooperation with the Albertina (Austria), Gregory Crewdson is the definitive publication on the artist’s work.

Learn more about or purchase the book here

Details & Links:

• Published by Prestel: August 15th, 2024
• Hardcover, 280 pages, 9.4 x 11.8 in, 318 color illustrations
• ISBN: 978-3-7913-7738-4
• Book: Gregory Crewdson by Walter  Moser © 2024 The Albertina Museum, Vienna, and Prestel Verlag, Munich · London · New York
• Prestel: https://prestelpublishing.penguinrandomhouse.de/book/Gregory-Crewdson/Walter-Moser/Prestel/e627018.rhd
• Gregory Crewdson: https://gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson/
• Albertina: https://www.albertina.at/en/exhibitions/gregory-crewdson/