Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer best known for his elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American houses and neighbourhoods. He explores sterotypes about making art and his photos concentrate on a tension between nature and domesticity.
Crewson is one a leader in the practising of using staged events and constructed models in photographic art, blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. He focuses on suburban ladnscapes, carefully composing each photo with dramatic lighting.
His influences include his father, documentary photography and classic cinematic devices used in science fiction and horror films.
Crewdson mixes traditional documentary photographic styles with fictional elemnets. By using this technique the artist is no longer passively experiencing the world and then editing it. He is now an active individual creating his own world then photographing it.

"Twighlight" is a series of images made between 1998 and 2002. The whole series was shot at dusk when the light of nature merges with the artificial light of humans. The images are unsettling with an eerie sense of stillness.
One example was shot on a constructed stage where a boy in his underwear can be seen reaching into a bathroom drain. The dark, empty space below the floor and the dramatic lighting coming through the window turn what appears to be a mundane scene into something unexplicalbe in an unknown narrative.





Example from the "Twilight"
series.







In another series entitled "Hover" he moved out of his studio to photograph suburban scenes from a bird's eye view. The photos represent American life gone awry (a man mowing circular patterns in his lawn.)

I like the surrealness of Crewdson's photographs. Like Wall, his work is not often how it first appears and there is a sense of mystery to his work.