We are pleased to continue our Distinguished Lecture Series with virtual talks this season. Award winning photographer Gregory Crewdson will be the featured speaker on Sunday, March 21, 2021 at 4:00 p.m.
The lecture will take place via Zoom. Click here to join the meeting.
Gregory Crewdson’s photographs have entered the American visual lexicon, taking their place alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as indelible evocations of a silent psychological interzone between the everyday and the uncanny. Often working with a large team, Crewdson typically plans each image with meticulous attention to detail, orchestrating light, color, and production design to conjure dreamlike scenes infused with mystery and suspense. While the small-town settings of many of Crewdson’s images are broadly familiar, he is careful to avoid signifiers of identifiable sites and moments, establishing a world outside time.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Crewdson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. He lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has produced a succession of widely acclaimed bodies of work, from Natural Wonder (1992–97) to Cathedral of the Pines (2013–14). Beneath the Roses (2003–08), a series of pictures that took nearly ten years to complete—and which employed a crew of more than one hundred people—was the subject of the 2012 feature documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro.
A survey of Crewdson’s work of the previous twenty years toured European museums from 2005 to 2008. The exhibition In a Lonely Place traveled to galleries and museums across Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand from 2011 to 2013, and a major monograph was published by Rizzoli in 2013. Crewdson’s awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship.
Now in its 14th season, the Distinguished Lecture Series is organized and hosted by Dr. Jeremy Yudkin. Dr. Yudkin is a resident of the Berkshires and professor of music at Boston University and Oxford University. Every summer at the Lenox Library he presents the pre-concert lectures for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood season.
All programs in the Distinguished Lecture Series are FREE and open to the public thanks to the generosity of the speakers and donors like you. In addition, we are grateful to the Lenox Library Association for its sponsorship of Zoom, which makes these programs possible.