Twilight. Photographs by Gregory Crewdson

Twilight is the magic hour when ordinary routines undergo strange transformations. Gregory Crewdson’s Twilight series, begun in 1998 and completed in 2002, consists of forty photographs created as elaborately staged large-scale tableaux that explore the domestic landscape and its relationship to an artificially heightened natural world. The collision between the normal and the paranormal in these narrative images produces a tension that serves to transform the topology of the suburban landscape into a place of wonder and anxiety.

As Rick Moody suggests in his essay, Crewdson seems preocupied with «the resection of the suburban ideal, where dream strategies, like condensation and displacement, the action of metaphor, undergird the here and now.» Moody’s essay reveals as much as it withholds, suggesting the ways that life and memory can be points of entry into art.