Lectures
Iwan Baan and Gregory Crewdson
Workshop
Iwan Baan
Dutch photographer Iwan Baan is known primarily for images that narrate the life and interactions that occur within architecture. Born in 1975, Iwan grew up outside Amsterdam, studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and worked in publishing and documentary photography in New York and Europe.
With his combined passion for documentary and space, Baan’s photographs reveal our innate ability to re-appropriate our available objects and materials, in order to find a place we can call our own. Examples of this can be seen in his work on informal communities where vernacular architecture and placemaking serve as examples of human ingenuity, such as his images of the Torre David in Caracas – a series that won Baan the Golden Lion for Best Installation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
With no formal training in architecture, his perspective mirrors the questions and perspectives of the everyday individuals who give meaning and context to the architecture and spaces that surround us, and this artistic approach has given matters of architecture an approachable and accessible voice.
As the inaugural recipient of the Julius Shulman award for photography, today, architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Toyo Ito, SANAA and Morphosis turn to Baan to give their work a sense of place and narrative within their environments. Alongside his architecture commissions, Iwan has collaborated on several successful book projects such as Insular Insight: Where Art and Architecture Conspire with Nature, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities and Brasilia & Chandigarh – Living With Modernity. Baan’s work also appears on the pages of architecture, design and lifestyle publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Architectural Record, Domus, Abitare and Architectural Digest.
Gregory Crewdson
Mr. Crewdson received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1985 and an M.F.A. in photography from Yale in 1988. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York. Mr. Crewdson’s work is represented in many public collections, most notably the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Traveling retrospectives of his work have been shown at major museums around Europe. The most recent, entitled In a Lonely Place, was exhibited through 2013 at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; City Gallery Wellington, and Dunedin Art Gallery, Dunedin. It had traveled previously to Kulturhuset, Stockholm; The Black Diamond, Copenhagen; c/o Berlin; the Stenersen Museum, Oslo; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. He has received numerous awards including the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Mr. Crewdson has published several books of his photographs including Hover (Artspace Books), Dream of Life (University of Salamanca, Spain), Twilight (Harry N. Abrams), Beneath the Roses (Harry N. Abrams), Gregory Crewdson from 1985 to 2005 (Hatje Cantz), Sanctuary (Harry N. Abrams), and most recently, Gregory Crewdson, a catalogue raisonné (Rizzoli). He was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1993 and is associate professor and director of graduate studies in photography.