Customer Reviews

Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Crewdson uses elements of documentary photography and cinema to give authority and narrative to intricately and flawlessly constructed, amazingly artificial scenes. To criticize these photographs for being "forced" or lacking sincerity is like criticising a race car driver for driving too fast. The amount of effort and detail that went into constructing these realities is the entire point of this book. A photograph doesn't have to refer to something that is "real" in order to be valuable, compelling, and beautiful in its own right. This is an excellent, highly recomended book.

This book is an incredible documentation of community-based art. The artist, Gregory Crewdson, worked over years to unite a small town in the hills of Massachusetts to create art.
It's inspiring to find out that the people of the town (Lee) not only donate their houses for photo shoots, but they also block off streets and are subjects of the photographs.
The photos in the book are accompanied by text written by Rick Moody. The text is interesting, touching on the psychological forces compelling Crewdson to create art--but the real treat is in the photographs themselves.
The work is produced far away from the mainstream art world of Chelsea, yet it has made a great impression there.

These photos are 'quiet' but intriguing. The lightings in these photos are amazing. Sometimes it is hard to believe that these are photos and not drawings.

I personally like photos/movies shot under low budget -- and these settings were certainly not cheap -- but if you don't mind that, this is good book to have.

I think the cover photo (also plate #19) is the best. There are 40 total plates. Most of the other images are odd but not worth what I paid. There are maybe about a dozen images that are pretty cool and thought provoking. I liked the woman kitchen kneeling down in a kitchen filled flower garden bed...the kid with his arm down the shower reaching into the crawlspace -- viewed in crossection...the pheasant feast of wonderbread stacked towers in the rear of someone's yard ... If you find a cheap copy it's interesting enough.

I love this book, its so inspiring. The title "twilight" is a time of the day when things seem real but at the same time they dont. The thing I love is that the illustrations look like photographs in a way, which is the piont their trying to make.

Gregory Crewdson's book Twilight has the feel of a big budget science fiction film documented in gorgeous still imagery; the images work together to tell a story of what, on the surface, appears to be a typical suburban town. Using a large format 8x10 camera and a variety of extremely heavy-duty film lights (ranging from 1-12Ks), it has been reported that each photograph took up to a month to create. He even lists the "credits" at the end of the book, as if it were the end of a film, along with behind-the-scenes snapshots that show the making of some of the photographic scenes.

For this series, Crewdson took over a suburban village and transformed it into a world of mysterious happenings that have somehow put every inhabitant in a trance. His photographs were intricately constructed, from sets with stuffed wolves and bears to mountains of sandwiches to rolls of lawn sod built into a giant pyramid. Crewdson's scenes take place all over the "city," in a variety of private home settings and outdoor scenes that show the whole disheveled neighborhood. Mounds of garbage, a plethora of dazed, pregnant women, and unexplained light sources beaming from the sky, through the windows of a neighbor's home, from cracks in the floor, every image gives the viewer the sense of an extraterrestrial presence in a home setting many are familiar with.

The book leaves the viewer wondering-What is it that is making these otherwise seemingly normal people wander the streets naked, every face mesmerized, lost in a trance? Who on earth is responsible for all of these pregnant women? And most of all, will this eerie, haunting presence ever come to light?

Does it even have to?

it looks like normal pictures is random places unto you start to watch the behinde the scene history then you say WWOOOOOWWWW
this guy creates everything from scratch...... they crach trucks, creack the sealling to pass a part of a tree etc....

The book is thorough and high quality. The pictures selected are wonderful and a must have for any Gregory Crewdson fanatic. Fantastic.

I couldn't put it better than the reader from Maryland but I guess I find the images a bit more captivating than he/she did. What's disturbing to me is that Crewdson's work seems to be another example of our collective march into what I can only call techno-gigantism. Star Wars comes to Art. Thanks to science, technology, big business, show business & MONEY, anything can be accomplished. It's the equivalent of a basketball team of 8-footers who never miss the basket. Was all this effort worth the puny results?

While Gregory Crewdson may be the most overhyped, overpaid photography around today, he is also a master of this type of color, creative, fictive scene. This work is deliberate, deep, and strange, and includes a good essay by Rick Moody. It is a modern masterwork, for sure, and while Crewdson's retrospective book "1985-2005" is average at best, this cohesive body of work is well worth the price.