Gregory Crewdson valuation
Stages a single photograph like a film, with a crew, a set and weeks of planning, and leaves the story unfinished.
Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn in 1962, studied at SUNY Purchase, where he took a photography course with Laurie Simmons, and took his MFA at Yale in 1988.
What a work by Gregory Crewdson is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn in 1962, studied at SUNY Purchase, where he took a photography course with Laurie Simmons, and took his MFA at Yale in 1988. He has since taught at the Yale School of Art, as director of graduate studies in photography. Each of his pictures is produced like a scene from a film, with a lighting crew, an art director, make-up, wardrobe and props, dozens of people and weeks or months of planning for one frame, and he has worked with the same director of photography, Richard Sands, for about twenty-five years. Almost all of it has been made in small towns in Western Massachusetts. People stand alone in ordinary houses and streets, often at dusk, in the middle of something the picture never explains.
What comes to market is large-format colour photography, sold in editions through his galleries, so the series, the print size and the edition number are the first things to establish. Edition sizes vary widely: one mural-sized print from Beneath the Roses was sold as one of six, while a small print from the same series, made for Aperture, came in an edition of 70, and the two are very different objects. Signed prints issued with his books are a category of their own. Most of the pictures are called Untitled, sometimes with a name in brackets, such as Untitled (The Fort) of 2006, so the series and year matter as well as the title. A print this size marks easily, and surface condition, exposure to light and the original framing all count. The signature and edition details are usually on a label on the reverse, and the gallery invoice is the usual documentation.
At a glance
- Born
- 1962, Brooklyn
Twilight to Eveningside
Twilight (1998 to 2002) and Beneath the Roses (2003 to 2008) established the method, and Beneath the Roses was published by Abrams in 2008 with a text by Russell Banks. Sanctuary, of 2009, was made at the Cinecittà studios in Rome, the only series he has made outside the United States. Cathedral of the Pines (2013 to 2014) moved into the forests of Becket, Massachusetts, the place of his earliest childhood memories and his home since 2011. An Eclipse of Moths (2018 to 2019) and Eveningside (2021 to 2022) followed.
The 2012 film Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro, follows the making of the pictures. His work is in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty, the Whitney and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and he is represented by Gagosian.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
