Gregory Crewdson’s new, eponymous monograph has been created as the catalogue for an exhibition currently held at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Published by Prestel and edited by the museum’s chief curator of photography Walter Moser, it promises to be the most comprehensive study of the renowned American photographer’s practice to date, spanning nine of his most iconic bodies of work, and delving deeply into the artist’s process, focal points and motivations.

Having worked in the medium for more than three decades, Crewdson has established himself as one of the most clever and technically gifted practitioners of his generation. Known for his atmospheric and often surreal images, which blend elements of cinema, Old Master painting and staged photography, his work has become a source of inspiration for many of his contemporaries, as well as younger generations of photographers. He works slowly, methodically and meticulously, crafting immensely detailed photographs that often take weeks or months to plan and hundreds of crew members to bring to life.

In the new monograph, these spellbinding images take centre stage and are divided into nine sections, each belonging to a different body of work that has come to define Crewdson’s practice.

Included in these series is the strange and mysterious Twilight (1998–2002) – possibly his most iconic project – which draws inspiration from Steven Spielberg’s seminal film Close Encounters of the Third Kind in its eerie take on domestic reality; as well as Beneath the Roses (2003–2008), which once again situates itself in suburbia in order to explore “the recesses of the American psyche and the disturbing dramas at play within quotidian environments”.

The book also features more recent projects such as Eveningside (2021–2022), which was envisaged as the final chapter in a trilogy Crewdson had been developing for the last decade. The first two instalments are Cathedral of the Pines (2013–2014) and An Eclipse of Moths (2018–2019). Together, they form a captivating portrait of America’s heartland, told through the lens of the elusive American dream and its gradual disappearance from the country’s forgotten suburbs, and rendered using Crewdson’s signature cinematic style.

Those cinematic connections play out in the book’s texts, with filmmaker David Fincher and Matthieu Orléan, an exhibition curator specialising in film, among the book’s many contributors.

In the book’s foreword, Albertina Museum director Klaus Albrecht Schröder remarks on the photographer’s arguably surprising label of a realist. “His photographs show how the irrational, the enigmatic, and the uncanny find their way into the everyday without, however, fully clarifying the implied narratives. Often indecisive and full of unease, the protagonists in Crewdson’s photographs have come to a complete standstill, appearing introverted and lost. The artist thus depicts a society in which people have grown alienated from one another – and in this he is indeed a realist.”

Gregory Crewdson is published by Prestel; prestelpublishing.penguinrandomhouse.de