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Rating: 
Summary: Thin ideas get the Hollywood treatment
Review: Crewdson certainly went to a lot of trouble to put together his elaborate tableaux, but why the bother? This trendy, but vapid and shallow collection of images should be heading directly to the remainder tables of your local bookstore on a brief journey before getting the pulping it so richly deserves. With the depth and richness of a GAP ad, Crewdson manages to come up with a thin and lifeless confection. Note to Greg Crewdson: Next time you build a bunch of sets, why not at least make a bad movie? Maybe you could go halfsies with David Lynch. Guess what? Surrealism got co-opted by Madison Avenue 25 years ago. Now you're taking it back and watering it down even more? If only they had more character, these photographs would be annoying. However, like so many bad fashion images, there's no heart, no brain, no courage. Which leaves -- ennui. If Crewdson is trying to recreate the exquisite boredom of idly paging through a dog-eared copy of Highlights in your dentist's office, then bravo! For cinematic photography see Cindy Sherman. For insights into suburbia see Bill Owens or one of the New Topographers. For flaccid academic art; wait until this exhibition rolls into your local third-string contemporary art museum.
Rating: 
Summary: Amazing
Review: Crewdson uses elements of documentary photography and cinema to give authority and narrative to intricately and flawlessly constructed, amazingly artificial scenes. To criticize these photographs for being "forced" or lacking sincerity is like criticising a race car driver for driving too fast. The amount of effort and detail that went into constructing these realities is the entire point of this book. A photograph doesn't have to refer to something that is "real" in order to be valuable, compelling, and beautiful in its own right. This is an excellent, highly recomended book.
Rating:
Summary: AWESOME!!
Review: Gregory Crewdson's work is nothing less than incredible--beautiful and haunting at the same time. No wonder he was mentioned on HBO's show "6 Feet Under." He influences popular culture--he is not influenced by it like the previous reviewer claimed (who is no doubt a bitter failed artist.)
This unique and incredible art book is a must buy!
Rating: 
Summary: Cold & distant. Quintessential NYC Chelsea techno-trendy.
Review: I couldn't put it better than the reader from Maryland but I guess I find the images a bit more captivating than he/she did. What's disturbing to me is that Crewdson's work seems to be another example of our collective march into what I can only call techno-gigantism. Star Wars comes to Art. Thanks to science, technology, big business, show business & MONEY, anything can be accomplished. It's the equivalent of a basketball team of 8-footers who never miss the basket. Was all this effort worth the puny results?
Rating:
Summary: Elephantine and Shallow
Review: The photographs in this book are big, glossy, cinematic...and ultimately dull and derivative. Yet those who hold this type of photography as an example of what is wrong with all contemporary art perhaps fail to understand that there is a good deal of photography mining the same themes, but with much more verve and far less self-conscious pretension. One can find mystery and surrealistic undercurrents in the most mundane of contemporary settings...one can depict such settings as dystopian...but there are photographers like Philip Lorca di Corcia and Paul Graham who have done so in recent monographs with execution that is ostensibly simpler, yet riskier and far more bracing in its results. Crewdson is a talented professional whose influence in the contemporary photography world and in academia is significant, but in this book he commits so many sins it's tough to know where to start in pinpointing what makes this book so leaden. Ultimately, it's the sheer overstatement in presentation that seems to turn the images into white elephant art (to borrow a term from film critic Manny Farber)...an overstated style that evokes the dreadful excesses of the film American Beauty and David Lynch's most self-indulgent moments. And since Crewdson works in the realm of still images and not in film or video, he doesn't have the benefit of motion, nuanced characters or any reasonable narrative (unlike a show like Six Feet Under, for example) to keep the images from landing with a huge thud. Though there are some "Recurring Themes" in the images (which seem to involve pregnancy and mounds of flowers), whatever narrative or mystery these may imply is simply not worth considering while being assaulted with the sheer excess of everything. The expressions on the faces of the many mannequins in the book have all the subtlety of silent movie acting, except silent movies (and silent movie actors) on the whole are far more poetic in their projection than the sorry models Crewdson chooses to present to the viewer. Crewdson's dramatic lighting of his stillborn subjects only accentuates the shallowness of his concepts. If you have a friend that loves the scene from the film "American Beauty" where Annette Benning listens to self-help tapes at an ear-deafening volume, if they consider this a solid critique of contemporary American life, Crewdson's equally vacuous volume will make the perfect coffee-table gift. To those looking for more craft, more subtlety, more depth, diCorcia's "A Storybook Life" or Paul Graham's "American Night", or even work from Crewdson's female disciples from Yale like Justine Kurland (to name just a few) -- these explore similar themes with far more rewarding results.
Rating:
Summary: Yikes-It's a pretty good show and so's the book
Review: The show is actually pretty interesting. The work really makes sense in large format but the book does a good enough job of representing the work. I would quibble with some of the image selections, otherwise they are first rate reproductions and it's reasonably priced. Try to see the show, the lush colors and scale are fantastic.
Rating:
Summary: How disappointing
Review: There are artists whose images evoke a sincerity that is missing from most of these images. These photographs seem forced, overly contrived, pretentious, and redundant.
Look at what the photographer George Tice can do with light and the landscape. A photographer, an idea, and a camera. How simple, how sincere.
Rating:
Summary: fascinating photos and read
Review: This book is an incredible documentation of community-based art. The artist, Gregory Crewdson, worked over years to unite a small town in the hills of Massachusetts to create art.
It's inspiring to find out that the people of the town (Lee) not only donate their houses for photo shoots, but they also block off streets and are subjects of the photographs.
The photos in the book are accompanied by text written by Rick Moody. The text is interesting, touching on the psychological forces compelling Crewdson to create art--but the real treat is in the photographs themselves.
The work is produced far away from the mainstream art world of Chelsea, yet it has made a great impression there.
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Summary: Beautiful and Wonderful Photographs by Crewdson
Review: This exciting collection of photographs by Gregory Crewdson finally arrives! It is so wonderful to have these images together in a gorgeous book to bring home to my own living room. I have always enjoyed Crewdson's brilliantly detailed and beautifully cinematic images that evoke wonder and awe. There are excellent photographs in this collection. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who appreciates contemporary art.
Rating:
Summary: 6-feet under
Review: This is the Gregory Crewdson recently mentioned on the great show "six feet under." His work is intriguing--but what's more amazing is that he involves the community members of a small town called Lee, MA. They all pitch in to help create and even star in the photos, something which few artists do these days.
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