| Description |
Gregory Crewdson's Twilight (1998-2002) is a series o f photographs depicting scenes o f American suburbia embedded in psychological anxiety and uncanny undercurrents. Crewdson stages these photographs, constructing fragmented narratives evoking fantasy, magic and the supernatural, pulling from cinematic techniques and film genre to infuse his pictures with both familiarity and mystery. This thesis explores Crewdson's photographs as they pertain to particular complexities found in contemporary photography discourse today. The first chapter situates Crewdson's photographs in an art historical context and aligns him with contemporary photographers working with the same themes. In different ways, their work questions and challenges photography's relationship to truth while simultaneously depending on photography's ability to faithfully record and document. The second chapter focuses on Crewdson's use o f the window, as both a self-referencing device used to highlight the intrinsic nature o f photography and also as a site where voyeurism is emphasized. Crewdson's photographs also are infused with the cinematic, both aesthetically and in his staged tableaux, and the final chapter explores their relationship with film, specifically focusing the use o f narrative and genre. |
