Gregory Crewdson

This image reveals the working process behind the film-scale stage sets produced at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art for one of Gregory Crewdson’s mural-size photographs. Within an elaborately fabricated bedroom and bathroom, production assistants prepare a nude model for the shoot. The ceiling above is open, exposing the fixtures by which Crewdson controls the lighting in these spaces to create the disturbing, paranormal atmosphere characteristic of his final photographs. The nudity of the model and the deliberately haphazard scattering of her clothes on the carpet hint at the strange and vaguely troubling story being developed.