Gregory Crewdson, By Gregory Crewdson - Review

The very ethos of his practice is rooted in a 1960s American obsession with the implications of space travel and, with that, an embedded fear of otherness,” writes the Guggenheim’s Nancy Spector in her introduction to this 30-year retrospective of Crewdson’s work.

The images included in the book are from selected series of his work, from the better known Beneath the Roses (2003-08) and Sanctuary (2009) – staged in New England with the help of large crews and elaborate, technical sets – to the little-seen black-and-white images of Fireflies and the posed portraits of suburban decay and danger in Natural Wonder and Twilight.

His work has been described as cinematic but there is also a literary quality to it – a sense of a narrative in the middle of happening. Appropriate then that the novelist Jonathan Lethem has written a short story to accompany each series. Dream House features actresses, including Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, in scenes which surreally mix destruction or violation with a sense of the quotidian or even bored: a man sits in his car in a small-town street, surrounded by harsh artificial light and smashed flowers; a girl opens a suitcase beside an overturned car. The image above is an untitled early work (1986-88).

Crewdson is represented in Britain by the White Cube.