INTERVIEW

US photographer Gregory Crewdson is famous for his cinematic images. After a recent exhibition of his work, Steve Fairclough discovers more about his career

Harper Glantz

Gregory Crewdson

Fine-art photographer

Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1962. He is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now the director of graduate studies in photography. He is based in New York and Massachusetts.

In a career spanning more than three decades, he has produced many acclaimed bodies of work, influenced by films and paintings, from ‘Natural Wonder’ (1992-1997) to ‘Cathedral of the Pines’ (2013-2014). His ‘Beneath the Roses’ series was the subject of a 2012 documentary GregoryCrewdson: Brief Encountersby Ben Shapiro.

www.gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson/

Elsa Okasaki Gregory Crewdson

Walter Moser

Photography curator

Walter Moser is chief curator and head of the photographic collection at the Albertina Museum, Vienna since 2011 and also teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Moser studied history of art in both Vienna and Rome. He has curated many exhibitions and is the author of various publications on photography.

www.albertina.at

The Basement, from the series: ‘Cathedral of the Pines’ (2013-2014). Digital pigment print. The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Permanent loan – Private Collection © Gregory Crewdson

Since 1986, the US photographer Gregory Crewdson has been luring viewers into the eerie and evolving worlds of his cinematic, highly detailed, meticulously planned and staged photographs. His work began with the appropriately titled ‘Early Work (19861988)’ and was originally shot on film, with negatives overlapped to achieve sharpness across the frame. Crewdson is equally happy working with black and white or colour imagery and his pictures clearly show influences from the worlds of cinema and painting.

He has recently had a major exhibition at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, curated by Walter Moser and accompanied by a book compiled and edited by Moser. To find out more about the complex approach and creative processes of Gregory Crewdson’s photography, Digital Camera spoke to Walter Moser…

When did you first become aware of Gregory Crewdson’s work?

It was in the late 1990s after he published the first photographs from ‘Twilight’, which had a major impact on the art scene. After my studies, I was very much interested in the relationship between photography and cinema. My PhD was on film stills – photographs taken by photographers on film sets for the promotion of films and Gregory played a huge part in the postmodern tradition that references cinema and popular culture. So from the beginning, Gregory was always an artist that I followed closely.