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Title: Twilight : Photographs by Gregory Crewdson by Rick Moody, Gregory Crewdson ISBN: 0-8109-1003-9 Publisher: Harry N. Abrams Pub. Date: 01 May, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.6 (10 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Elephantine and Shallow
Comment: The photographs in this book are big, glossy, cinematic...and ultimately dull and derivative. Yet those who hold this type of photography as an example of what is wrong with all contemporary art perhaps fail to understand that there is a good deal of photography mining the same themes, but with much more verve and far less self-conscious pretension. One can find mystery and surrealistic undercurrents in the most mundane of contemporary settings...one can depict such settings as dystopian...but there are photographers like Philip Lorca di Corcia and Paul Graham who have done so in recent monographs with execution that is ostensibly simpler, yet riskier and far more bracing in its results.
Crewdson is a talented professional whose influence in the contemporary photography world and in academia is significant, but in this book he commits so many sins it's tough to know where to start in pinpointing what makes this book so leaden. Ultimately, it's the sheer overstatement in presentation that seems to turn the images into white elephant art (to borrow a term from film critic Manny Farber)...an overstated style that evokes the dreadful excesses of the film American Beauty and David Lynch's most self-indulgent moments.
And since Crewdson works in the realm of still images and not in film or video, he doesn't have the benefit of motion, nuanced characters or any reasonable narrative (unlike a show like Six Feet Under, for example) to keep the images from landing with a huge thud. Though there are some "Recurring Themes" in the images (which seem to involve pregnancy and mounds of flowers), whatever narrative or mystery these may imply is simply not worth considering while being assaulted with the sheer excess of everything. The expressions on the faces of the many mannequins in the book have all the subtlety of silent movie acting, except silent movies (and silent movie actors) on the whole are far more poetic in their projection than the sorry models Crewdson chooses to present to the viewer. Crewdson's dramatic lighting of his stillborn subjects only accentuates the shallowness of his concepts.
If you have a friend that loves the scene from the film "American Beauty" where Annette Benning listens to self-help tapes at an ear-deafening volume, if they consider this a solid critique of contemporary American life, Crewdson's equally vacuous volume will make the perfect coffee-table gift. To those looking for more craft, more subtlety, more depth, diCorcia's "A Storybook Life" or Paul Graham's "American Night", or even work from Crewdson's female disciples from Yale like Justine Kurland (to name just a few) -- these explore similar themes with far more rewarding results.
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautiful and Wonderful Photographs by Crewdson
Comment: This exciting collection of photographs by Gregory Crewdson finally arrives! It is so wonderful to have these images together in a gorgeous book to bring home to my own living room. I have always enjoyed Crewdson's brilliantly detailed and beautifully cinematic images that evoke wonder and awe. There are excellent photographs in this collection. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who appreciates contemporary art.
Rating: 5
Summary: Amazing
Comment: 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.
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Title: Hover : Artist monographs with fiction by Gregory Crewdson, Rick Moody, Darcey Steinke, Joyce Carol Oates, Bradford Morrow ISBN: 1891273000 Publisher: Artspace Books Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Philip-Lorca diCorcia by Philip-Lorca Dicorcia, Peter Galassi ISBN: 0870701452 Publisher: Distributed Art Publishers Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Anna Gaskell by Anna Gaskell, Thom Jones, Nancy Spector ISBN: 1576870693 Publisher: powerHouse Books Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: Charlie White: Photographs by Charlie White, Ronald Jones ISBN: 3980760294 Publisher: Goliath Corp. Pub. Date: 01 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Resemblance: Photographs by Anna Gaskell by Anna Gaskell ISBN: 1879886499 Publisher: Addison Gallery of American Art Pub. Date: 15 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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