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 enlarge | Author: Rick Moody
Creator: Gregory Crewdson
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Category: Book
List Price: $40.00
Buy New: $17.94
You Save: $22.06 (55%)
New (30) Used (9) Collectible (5) from $17.94
Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 45064
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 112
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 11.7 x 10.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0810910039
Dewey Decimal Number: 779.092
EAN: 9780810910034
ASIN: 0810910039
Publication Date: May 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new book - May have a remainder mark. SLIGHT SHELF WEAR ON DUST COVER
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| Customer Reviews:
It's photographs, but not about photography July 4, 2005
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
Anyone who comes to this book looking for a traditional concept of photography WILL be disappointed. 90% of the image is the development - set building, character choice, costuming, decorating. The photograph is almost an afterthought - all of that is done to produce the photo, but the photo is only a record of the event. Painting the images would almost be a more honest approach, because only then would the artist control ever single aspect of image creation.
The art on display here, then, is not the photograph. If you want to see traditional photography, go buy an Eggleston or Iturbide book. It is getting an entire town to participate in the creation of images, the conceptual undertow that tugs you into an image wondering why exactly that pregnant woman is standing that way. These are images that will creep into the edges of your dreams on restless nights. Some are cool, distant, observations from on high. Others are intimate encounters with things that you almost wish had remained in the head of the creator instead of being poured into yours. It is probably one of two or three strongest examples of photographs of scenes within the total control of the photographer.
I've used this book several times to get models to drop their rigidity and concept of self, and to let mystery happen. Whatever the books' faults, it does communicate well, which is what a photograph should be about.
 Self Absorbed Nonsense June 19, 2005
7 out of 20 found this review helpful
Redundant, appropriated, and trite imagery. These are technically slick images, but the subject matter is quite immature. What is all the hype about? After a few images they all seem the same. These images are ridiculous. Is the artist a teenager?
 Eh, its okay, not great, but not completely awful April 6, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I think the cover photo (also plate #19) is the best. There are 40 total plates. Most of the other images are odd but not worth what I paid. There are maybe about a dozen images that are pretty cool and thought provoking. I liked the woman kitchen kneeling down in a kitchen filled flower garden bed...the kid with his arm down the shower reaching into the crawlspace -- viewed in crossection...the pheasant feast of wonderbread stacked towers in the rear of someone's yard ... If you find a cheap copy it's interesting enough.
Elephantine and Shallow December 31, 2003
9 out of 19 found this review helpful
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.
 Amazing May 31, 2003
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
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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