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 images. Born in Brooklyn in 1962, Crewdson’s work and aesthetic are influenced heavily by Diane Arbus, David Lynch, and Japanese silent film director Yasujiro Ozu. Crewdson continues his ongoing series of elaborately staged, large-scale color photographs that explore the psychological underside of the American vernacular. 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.

Further collaboration can be found in Hover, where Crewdson’s singular photos are found beside fiction by the likes of Rick Moody and Joyce Carol Oates. Each of these three pictures feature themes and motifs and iconography that I still use as central elements in my pictures. It’s far from how a travel photographer or photojournalist works but I learned a lot about light by looking at his photos. Crewdson's brand of psychological realism is shaped by an American aesthetic tradition of art and film that explores the intersection of everyday life and theatricality. I assembled a production team of sorts, some whom were experienced in film, but many others who didn’t have any such experience or background at all, but were simply willing to help.

wing, Bell Nakai, Lin Yen-Liang and Sun-Kyo Park - five artists we were excited to meet earlier this year. 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. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

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. Both entirely foreign and oddly familiar, these images are carefully orchestrated events that challenge our very notions of familiarity, undermining our sense of certainty. In this series of photographs, Crewdson does a great job of employing a directorial and cinematic mode of photography that can only occur due to weeks of planning and behind the scenes organization and production.These enigmatic photographs capture the mysterious moment of time between before and after, revealing unknowable or unimaginable aspects of domestic reality - superimposing a space of surreality opening onto a scene of dream strategies. At the meeting point of suburbia with something altogether more wild, Crewdson configures a mysterious relationship between a man, his car and a luminous open shed. I like the way that something as simple as a ray of light can change a landscape from ordinary to mysterious or uncanny. 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.

The scenes of Twilight are created in collaboration with a large production crew, and the members of a small suburban community.We were putting lights up in landscaping lifts, often tying into residential electricity, cobbling things together. What came before and is coming after so, in effect, the purpose of showing the transition of before and after has, for me, been achieved.

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.In his latest series of large-format color photographs, Cathedral of the Pines, Crewdson takes the viewer to the forests of Becket, Massachusetts—the locale of his earliest childhood memories and his home since 2011. Inspired by African and Iberian art, he also contributed to the rise of Surrealism and Expressionism. And he creates a unique way of making photography: staging a set like it's a cinematographic and not a photographic one. In dark shorts and T-shirt, he looks more like a top-heavy bicycle courier than a leading figure in America's art scene. Gregory Crewdson conjures images from the debris of our domestic lives, compressing moments into mysterious and mythological spaces.