Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson

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I was trying to invent a new way of making pictures, and I found the sense of infinite possibility slightly intoxicating.

Twilight: in that zone between the certainty of day and fear of the dark, Gregory Crewdson sets his eerie, enigmatic photographs. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Crewdson’s photography pulled me deeper into the world of image making when I was studying photography. It was the first time he made pictures with a full cinematic lighting team, including Director of Photography Richard Sands, a production crew, and art department: A working method he has continued ever since.These eerie and evocative photographs pair beauty with horror, obsession with disgust, and the real with the surreal, suggesting narratives open to endless interpretations.

In some photographs, the subjects seem occupied with peculiar domestic activities such as carving holes in the middle of a standard bedroom. I’ve been working on an idea for quite a while of this man who’s built this house out in the middle of the street and in this gesture has alienated himself from his family and his community. Having turned through the pages, I too was impressed with this photographer's surreal use of HDR and color rendering, turning seemingly ordinary slice of life scenes into beautiful works of art. In this case, I took real moths that I photographed for a previous series and composited them into the light.In Crewdson’s suburban re-working of the well-known Ophelia myth, a young woman floats calmly on the mirror-like surface of her flooded living room, her frozen impassivity reflective of all the characters in this series. He is not the first photographer to be drawn to twilight - "nature at its most impressive", according to the exhibition catalogue - but his images are uniquely tense, pregnant with atmosphere. It’s far from how a travel photographer or photojournalist works but I learned a lot about light by looking at his photos. As the light fades, there are often problems - with neighbours, the weather, unexpected interruptions. The original press release for an exhibition of work by Gregory Crewdson titled "Twilight" and held at Luhring Augustine, NYC, February 19 - March 25, 2000.

It consists of forty photographs that explore the domestic landscape and its relationship to an artificially heightened natural world—a collision between the normal and the paranormal. I find them very striking in that all the people in them appear dislocated from their current surroundings with almost blank features and stiff, motionless bodies they appear, to me, like the walking dead. With Twilight, a series of 40 elaborately-staged photographs taken between 1998 and 2002, Gregory Crewdson arrived at the epic, filmic approach which has come to define his instantly recognisable imag. I have created a kind of iconography for myself, but I'm not sure how it all adds up - and maybe I don't want to know.Begun in 1998 and completed in 2002, Twilight consists of forty photographs created as elaborately staged, large-scale tableaux that explore the relationship between the domestic and the fantastical, between the North American landscape and the topology of the imagination.

These are really expensive projects with very good starting ideas, but what I found is missing in almost if not all pictures from that huge project is, a purpose.

As smartphones and artificial intelligence make photography easier and easier, Crewdson makes it as difficult as he possibly can. The second print centres on a woman staring out to the world through a circle drawn in the dust on her window. Evocatively delightful sometimes haunting, this is a quality collection of artful images that stir ones spirit and imagination. The video above is great and well worth a look - very insighful and the work that goes on to produce the imagery! They have a certain visual quality that works well in pictures, but I also like them in terms of what they signify in our lives and the ways we think.