Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer born in Brooklyn, New York in 1962. Crewdson played in a punk rock band called the "Speedies" before attending SUNY Purchase College in Purchase, New York in the 1980s where he received his bachelor of fine arts degree and later continued his education and received his master of fine arts from Yale University in 1988. Crewdson has taught at Vassar College, Cooper Union, and has been on the faculty of Yale University School of Art since 1993. Crewdson's series "Natural Wonder" was one of his first series of well-known work showing the grotesque narratives of paranoia, lust, and fantasy. "Natural Wonder" depicts dioramas constructed by Crewdson consisting of insects, bugs, plants, and mutilated body parts that he made using casts of his own body within hyper-real domestic settings. This series of images is very brightly colored and has busy compositions. Selected images from this series of work were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991 exhibition "Terrors in Domestic Comfort." .
In Crewdson's second series "Hover," he greatly widened his view from his previous tightly cropped close-ups. In "Hover" Crewdson photographed neighborhood streets in New England from elevated points of view using a crane. This heightened point of view makes the images seem almost voyeuristic. This series is also all black and white images which makes them seem more like documents of the streets below rather than images that are supposed to be vivid and beautiful. This series depicts imagery of strange and discomforting scenes such as a man covering a street with sod or a bear in the streets going through garbage with multiple human onlookers. In his next series "Twilight", Crewdson moves back into using color again as well as printing much larger for a dramatic effect (50"x60").
