Beneath the Roses

Best known for his elaborately choreographed, large-scale photographs, Gregory Crewdson is one of the most exciting and important artists working today. The images that comprise Crewdson's new series, "Beneath the Roses," take place in the homes, streets, and forests of unnamed small towns. The photographs portray emotionally charged moments of seemingly ordinary individuals caught in ambiguous and often disquieting circumstances. Both epic in scale and intimate in scope, these visually breathtaking photographs blur the distinctions between cinema and photography, reality and fantasy, what has happened and what is to come.

Beneath the Roses features an essay by acclaimed fiction writer Russell Banks, as well as many never-before-seen photographs, including production stills, lighting charts, sketches, and architectural plans, that serve as a window into Crewdson's working process. The book is published to coincide with exhibitions in New York, London, and Los Angeles.

Publishers Weekly

In these 49 elaborately staged photographs, Crewdson (Twilight) reveals his vision of America in lush and brooding images of dusk, each one bristling with atmosphere: a young boy stares at a naked woman standing in the open door of her trailer; a woman, observed through a motel window, looks at a baby sleeping on the bed; a man stands in a deserted intersection in the rain, his car door open behind him. Although Crewdson's work is frequently interpreted cinematically, and stylistic comparisons are drawn between him and David Lynch and Wes Anderson, in the book's preface, writer Banks argues that analogies to the movies do the photographer a disservice. According to Banks, looking at Crewdson's photographs resembles reading fiction more than anything else; it is not a passive experience (such as watching a movie) but an invitation to actively imagine alongside the artist. Crewdson's sets do boast the budgets and crew normally associated with movies, however, and this collection includes 23 extra pages of set drawings, location shots and images of the actors and props used to create the photographs-perfectly in keeping with a body of work that, as Banks states, "tests the limits of realism while making no effort to disguise its artificiality." (May)

Gregory Crewdson is an internationally exhibited artist whose photographs are also the subject of Abrams’ Twilight. He teaches at the Yale University School of Art and lives in New York city.

Russell Banks is an award-winning writer whose works of fiction include Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, and The Darling. He has contributed essays to Vanity Fair, Harper’s, and many other publications. He lives in upstate New York.