"He'll tell me he wants women that look haunted or somebody who looks like they've lived a hard life," says casting director Juliane Hiam.Ĭrewdson teaches photography at Yale, but making pictures is his "main job" a Crewdson print can sell for up to $150,000. Crew members say he knows what he wants but is open to possibilities. For outdoor scenes, he'll drive around to find sites interiors are built on a soundstage at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. He often gets his ideas while swimming (he tries to get in some laps every day), but it takes months to produce a finished image. He and his wife, Ivy, an art consultant, live in Greenwich Village with their children, Lily, 3, and Walker, 1. The photographs in the book were taken over seven years at a cost of "less than you think it would," says Crewdson. "If you read a screenplay, it is telling you where to go.You take yourself places in one of his pictures." The resulting pictures, typically stitched together from negatives scanned into a computer, "look like paintings, but they give you an emotional feeling stronger than a lot of movies you'd walk away from," says Rick Sands, Crewdson's director of photography, who has also worked on films. Since then, he has used that landscape as a giant photo studio, seeking locations that he says evoke the "familiar and unfamiliar." While at the Yale University School of Art, where he earned an MFA in 1988, Crewdson spent lots of time taking pictures in western Massachusetts, where his family had a cabin. "I tend to think more in terms of images." "I have a very difficult time thinking linearly," he says. Dyslexia eventually drew Crewdson to photography. "The fact that his office was in our house always suggested some sense of the furtive or the secret," he says. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s, he was intrigued by his father's work as a psychoanalyst. "When I'm making my pictures, I never really think about what happens before or what happens after," says Crewdson, 45. His pictures set the stage for a story, but the viewer has to flesh it out. He uses such Hollywood-scale production techniques to create what he calls "in-between moments"-interludes just before or after unspecified but obviously momentous events. For some of the photographs collected in his new book, Beneath the Roses, he shut down public streets, used rainmaking machines to produce downpours-even simulated a raging house fire. Such preparation for a single photographic image may seem a bit much, but this was a relatively simple Crewdson shoot. Crewdson instructed the boy, who had been hanging around the bridge, to imagine "a dream world where everything is perfect." The illumination comes from lights suspended from cranes, and the fog rises from hidden machines. The photographer, Gregory Crewdson, scouted the spot under a Massachusetts railroad bridge for a month, and a crew of about 40 people spent days setting up the shot. The photograph seems utterly serendipitous: a boy stands under a bridge, framed by lush trees, and directs his (and the viewer's) gaze heavenward through backlit fog toward some unseen attraction.īut nothing has been left to chance. To create the illusion of a house fire, a special-effects expert used propane-fueled “flame bars” set near fireproofed window locations.