Look inside
Fireflies represents a striking and intimate departure from the massive, heavily staged cinematic productions for which Gregory Crewdson is primarily known. The book compiles work created during the summer of 1996, when the photographer spent two solitary months at his family's cabin in Becket, Massachusetts, obsessively documenting the evening landscape.
Using both small- and medium-format cameras, Crewdson set out each dusk to capture the glowing, erratic trails of fireflies. Stripped of his usual Hollywood-scale crews and elaborate artificial lighting rigs, this minimalist, black-and-white series reduces photography to its most elemental feature: drawing with light. The resulting 61 tritone reproductions represent a quiet, nearly impossible attempt to freeze the fleeting, elusive beauty of the insects' bioluminescence in the fading twilight.
Though visually distinct from the epic, full-color orchestrations of series like Twilight or Beneath the Roses, Fireflies is a crucial foundational work. It reveals the quiet undercurrents of isolation, longing, and the mysterious, untamed forces lurking within the rural American landscape that continue to permeate all of his later masterpieces.
Fireflies represents a striking and intimate departure from the massive, heavily staged cinematic productions for which Gregory Crewdson is primarily known. The book compiles work created during the summer of 1996, when the photographer spent two solitary months at his family's cabin in Becket, Massachusetts, obsessively documenting the evening landscape.
Using both small- and medium-format cameras, Crewdson set out each dusk to capture the glowing, erratic trails of fireflies. Stripped of his usual Hollywood-scale crews and elaborate artificial lighting rigs, this minimalist, black-and-white series reduces photography to its most elemental feature: drawing with light. The resulting 61 tritone reproductions represent a quiet, nearly impossible attempt to freeze the fleeting, elusive beauty of the insects' bioluminescence in the fading twilight.
Though visually distinct from the epic, full-color orchestrations of series like Twilight or Beneath the Roses, Fireflies is a crucial foundational work. It reveals the quiet undercurrents of isolation, longing, and the mysterious, untamed forces lurking within the rural American landscape that continue to permeate all of his later masterpieces.