Gregory Crewdson

chromogenic print, mounted, signed in ink on a label on the reverse, framed, Buhl Collection and Guggenheim Museum exhibition labels on the reverse, 1995, no. 3 in an edition of 6

Luhring Augustine, New York, 1996

New York, Thread Waxing Space, Collection in Context: Selected Contemporary Photographs of Hands from the Collection of Henry M. Buhl, September - October 1996, and 8 other national and international venues through 1999 (see Appendix 1)

New York, Guggenheim Museum, Speaking with Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection, June - September 2004, and 4 other international venues through 2007 (see Appendix 1)

Seoul, South Korea, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Speaking with Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection (Asian tour), March - May 2009, and 2 other Asian venues through 2011 (see Appendix 1)

Marianne Courville, Collection in Context: Selected Contemporary Photographs of Hands from the Collection of Henry M. Buhl (New York, 1996), pl. 24 (this print)

Jennifer Blessing, Speaking with Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection (Guggenheim Foundation, 2004), pp. 53 and 209 (this print)

This chromogenic print is in generally excellent condition. The colors remain rich and saturated, with no apparent fading.
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In the present image, the hand reaching out of the garden, ensnarled by thorn-covered vines, was cast from Crewdson's own arm.  Natural Wonder, a series of 40 photographs created between 1992 and 1997, was Crewdson's first major body of work after his 1988 thesis exhibition at Yale.  Unlike the later Twilight (1998-2002) and Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) series, both labor-intensive, large-crew productions, the hyper-organic world of Natural Wonder was created entirely indoors in the photographer's studio.  Through his use of fabricated still-life and dioramas, populated with stuffed wild-life and casts of the photographer's own limbs, Crewdson crafts a vibrant, if fictional, reality.  In a 1997 conversation with Bradford Morrow published in BOMB magazine, Crewdson explains: ‘ . .  . would describe myself as an American realist landscape photographer.  Despite the artifice in the pictures, I'm not interested in revealing the artifice as much as creating a believable or credible world.’