Walter Moser on Gregory Crewdson

US photographer Gregory Crewdson is famous for his cinematic images. After a recent exhibition of his work, Steve Fairclough discovers more about his career

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Since 1986, the US photographer Gregory Crewdson has been luring viewers into the eerie and evolving worlds of his cinematic, highly detailed, meticulously planned and staged photographs. His work began with the appropriately titled 'Early Work (19861988)' and was originally shot on film, with negatives overlapped to achieve sharpness across the frame. Crewdson is equally happy working with black and white or colour imagery and his pictures clearly show influences from the worlds of cinema and painting.

He has recently had a major exhibition at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, curated by Walter Moser and accompanied by a book compiled and edited by Moser. To find out more about the complex approach and creative processes of Gregory Crewdson's photography, Digital Camera spoke to Walter Moser...

When did you first become aware of Gregory Crewdson’s work?

It was in the late 1990s after he published the first photographs from ‘Twilight’, which had a major impact on the art scene. After my studies, I was very much interested in the relationship between photography and cinema. My PhD was on film stills – photographs taken by photographers on film sets for the promotion of films and Gregory played a huge part in the postmodern tradition that references cinema and popular culture. So from the beginning, Gregory was always an artist that I followed closely.

What do you think the appeal of Crewdson’s photography is? Is it to do with the scale of his work or is it more aesthetic?