Author: Leonard Zelig

In tandem with his first-ever retrospective at the Albertina, a new book pairs the prolific photographer’s work with writings from directors David Fincher and Matthieu Orléan, and novelist Emily St. John Mandel, among others.

Maggie Coughlan
August 7, 2024
Vanity Fair

“I’ve always said that I think every artist has one central story to tell,” photographer Gregory Crewdson says on a call from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he lives and works. “And they circle around that story, over and over again, over a lifetime, reinventing aspects of it and challenging others and trying to push things forward. But at the core of it, it’s like the central preoccupations remain fixed.”

The concept is particularly timely for the photographer, who for the past three-and-a-half decades has been constructing gripping images that call to mind film stills, as his first-ever retrospective opened in May at the Albertina in Vienna. Later this month, the eponymous exhibition takes new form with the release of Gregory Crewdson, its 280-page catalogue edited by the Albertina’s chief curator of photography Walter Moser and published by Prestel. The book features more than 300 photographs and production stills that examine the complexities of American suburbia, be it through someone wandering a parking lot, shirtless and unmoored, or a twosome’s forlorn gazes into a television as its glow illuminates a basement, paired with writings from directors David Fincher and Matthieu Orléan, and novelist Emily St. John Mandel, among others.

Gregory Crewdson – Walter Moser, Editor (Prestel, 2024)

For Crewdson, the process of revisiting nearly 40 years of work was “complicated,” but led him to draw parallels between his earliest endeavors and present-day work. “It’s interesting in that on some basic level everything’s changed and then on another level, nothing’s changed really,” he says. “When I look back at pictures I made when I was in graduate school, [those are] the first pictures in the show, they’re not that dissimilar in terms of the basic concerns—on a much more modest scale, of course.”

In advance of the catalogue’s release, Crewdson spoke with Vanity Fair about the possibility of making the switch from photography to directing feature-length films, and the story he’s been telling all these years.

Read the full interview

A sample of the writing by David Fincher, “A Difficult Truth”:

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Buy the book through the publisher