A collection has the potential to create a web of interlocking stories, influences and histories through the items it contains. In the case of art, what is collected embodies more than the sum of its parts: it is a node of communication about culture, ideas and ideologies. To give structure to their undertakings collectors often give themselves guidelines, allowing collections within collections to be made and enlightening overlaps and references to be constructed. One example of a defining boundary within the Zabludowicz Collection is its focus on the photography of Gregory Crewdson – professor of photography at Yale University in the USA since 1993 – and a selection of his graduating students, such as Matt Ducklo, Katy Grannan or, more recently, Laurel Nakadate and Bradley Peters.

Crewdson is known for unsettling staged narrative photographs of suburban America. His sensuous large-scale works are uncanny psychodramas in impossibly sharp landscapes or suburban situations. In Beneath the Roses (2005–8) he again pushes the very notion of an authentic photographic moment to the limit. Every millimetre of the image is constructed. Often compared more to paintings, his use of digital and Hollywood staging technologies allows him to create pictures where nothing is left to chance, everything is flattened and in focus.

Graduating from Yale in 2001, Laurel Nakadate works both in photography and film, placing herself at the centre of the nexus of author, subject and audience. She is occupied with a critical exploration not only of photography but also of the social structures which construct Western identity. Her work is a sticky knickerbocker glory of references: race, poverty, mental health and gender are thickly layered through her irksome images. In her recent feature-length motion picture Stay the Same Never Change (2008), Nakadate directs a series of protagonists through a mundane suburban American dream. In the Lucky Tiger series (2009) she photographs herself as an all-American cheesecake teen, posing against the landscapes of rural America complete with bikini, Stetson hat, pickup truck and cowboy boots. These photos were given to men whom she had groomed via craigslist.com. They were asked to look at them with their fingers coated in fingerprinting ink. The resulting prints, unique and smeared with the marks of the men’s gaze, question photography’s very place in the media saturation of twenty-first century life.

The focus on Crewdson and students goes alongside a similar strategy with Bernt and Hiller Becher and students of the Düsseldorf school, or Timm Rautert and his students from the Leipzig Academy. By concentrating on the work of one school of photography a collection can be built to question through a series of divergent lenses the larger issues of the era. Crewdson and his students’ works contain implicit criticism and references to landscape, photojournalism and street photography using the qualities inherent in the processes they employ. They also address a multitude of notions of manipulation and authenticity, issues that other photographers from different traditions choose not to concentrate on. Therefore a collection can tell a number of histories in one place, drawing a broader image of contemporary concerns into focus over time.