Gregory Crewdson

Suburbia always seemed a distant and exotic place for Gregory Crewdson, who grew up in Brooklyn. As the setting for his staged photographs, the suburbs have provided the perfect milieu for his uncanny narratives. To create his first mature body of work in the early 1990s, Crewdson constructed elaborate, small-scale dioramas of generic neighborhood backyards in which the flora and fauna enacted strange rituals: birds built a circle out of eggs, butterflies congregated to form a pyramid, vines turned into braids. Each of these miniature yet menacing worlds would be captured in a single photograph before being dismantled. Pregnant Woman in Pool belongs to his Twilight series (1998–2002), in which Crewdson expanded his subject matter to include images of individuals lost in the reverie of their own bizarre behavior, such as digging up a lawn within the confines of one’s own living room or wading, fully-dressed, in a kiddy pool at night. Shot in and around the town of Lee, Massachusetts, these surreal images were carefully constructed, much like sets for a film. In fact, Crewdson worked with a 35-person crew to achieve the cinematic feel of each image. He will often completely refabricate settings such as room interiors in order to create an atmosphere that seems entirely familiar, yet strange, to set the stage for how a work’s unfolding drama might best be imagined.