GREGORY CREWDSON

A pioneer of large-scale photography, Gregory Crewdson has been developing a unique photographic languageover the last thirty years. Each shot is the result of a lengthy pre-production process involving storyboards, actors,set building, technicians, special effects and sophisticated lighting.

The Eveningside exhibition was held this summer as part of a retrospective at the Arles Rencontres de laPhotographie event. Gregory Crewdson uses it to push the boundary between reality and fiction even further.He invents ambiguous suburban landscapes where the motionlessness of the characters, frozen in the mostordinary of daily activities, is both fascinating and disquieting. A fictional portrait of an America in anunidentifiable era, the scenes depict solitary figures, often captured through a complex interplay of mirrors,storefronts or places of transition: bridges, porches, mini-markets and hardware stores. His black-and-whitepalette draws skilfully on a series of special effects – fog, smoke and rain – to create atmospheres as melancholyas they are gothic, bringing to mind classical cinema, film noir and the realism of Edward Hopper’s paintings.

Gregory Crewdson’s work oscillates between the vulnerability of the human condition and the paradoxes of theAmerican dream. The complexity of the monochrome tones and their strange beauty offer a powerful metaphorfor the unendurable limits of our hyper-connected world, digital and blinded. Crewdson is never didactic, leavingthe viewer free to imagine the stories hidden beneath the surface and dream of other possibilities.

On Friday, November 10, Gregory Crewdson will take part in a discussion at the Maison Européenne de lePhotographie at 6PM.

On Saturday, November 11, the artist will do a book signin on Aperture’s stand at Paris Photo.

Born in 1962 in Brooklyn, Gregory Crewdson lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. He studied at SUNYPurchase, New York, then at Yale School of Art, where he is professor and director of graduate studies in

photography. His work has been widely exhibited and collected by numerous museums, including, in New York,the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum and Whitney Museum of AmericanArt, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and SmithsonianAmerican Art Museum in Washington. In Europe, he recently exhibited his work at the Centre for ContemporaryArt in Toruń, Poland (2018), The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2018), FRAC Auvergne in Clermont Ferrand(2017) and Gallerie d’Italia in Turin (2022). Galerie Templon showed part one of his trilogy, Cathedral of the Pines,in 2017 and part two, An Eclipse of Moths, in 2020. He has been represented by Galerie Templon since 2004 andthis will be his fifth exhibition with the gallery.