The Hasselblad Center once again presents one of the most renowned photographers in contemporary art – Gregory Crewdson. This exhibition is a comprehensive overview of the amazingly beautiful but also disturbing oeuvre of this American photographer.

Crewdson has dealt with the neuroses, fears, and secret desires of a society looking into the abyss of its own psyche since the mid-1980s. His images are set in suburban America and refer directly to the myths of Hollywood movies. His intricate and perfectly beautiful staged photographs were shot with the help of a large crew after weeks of extensive preparations on film-like studio sets or on location. His use of theatrical lighting design and fantastic and enchanting elements as well as his belief in a broad narrative style developed on the tradition of staged photography, which - since Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall at the very latest - has become one of the most important means of expression in contemporary photography.

The exhibition includes all of Crewdson’s important bodies of work such as Early Work, which he made as a graduate student from 1986 to 1988: domestic scenes are depicted as rooms of loneliness and vague expectations. These early images already show the artist's understanding of the photograph as a kind of cinematographic compression. Crewdson reduces and condenses his messages down to a single image, the perfect moment.

Natural Wonder, 1992 to 1997, reflects Crewdson's fascination with nature as a magical mythical zone full of mystifying events.

Hover (1996/1997) Crewdson's only black-and-white series to date represents a decisive step in the artist's development. He formulated his central subject for the first time here: A survey of suburban America as a psychoanalytical illumination of its dark sides.

In Hover as well as in the later groups Twilight, 1998-2002, Dream House, 2002, and Beneath the Roses, 2003-05, the artist worked more like a movie director than as a photographer. Every image required a large crew and extravagant production conditions similar to those on a film set. In Twilight, the puzzling and dark energies of an untamable nature arrive in the living room: Crewdson stages the act of making acquaintance with the unconscious and the denied.

The exhibition was produced by Kunstverein Hannover in co-operation with Fotomuseum Winterthur. With thanks to Luhring Augustine, New York and Galleria Emilio Mazzoli, Modena for lending the pictures to the exhibition.