Gregory Crewdson Quotes

I really love that dynamic between beauty and sadness ... theres always these moments of quiet alienation, the sense of disconnect, but also, these moments of possibility.

My pictures are about everyday life combined with theatrical effect. I want them to feel outside of time, to take something routine and make it irrational. I'm always looking for a small moment that is a revelation

Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures

My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear.

I don't deliberately look for something dark or bleak or disconnected, in fact that's not something I'm even conscious of in the work as I'm making it. I'm always trying to create beauty, reveal hope, show the sense of longing that exists in isolation and loneliness, and capture the search for something greater inside all of my subjects.

I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.

All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I'm looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery.

It is really important to have an obsessive need to construct something, to understand something from your own experience.

I feel very strongly that every artist has one central story to tell. The
struggle is to tell and retell that story over and over again, visual form,
and try to challenge that story. But at the core that story remains the same.
It's like the defining story of who you are.
-Gregory Crewdson, "Brief Encounters"

http://www.gregorycrewdsonmovie.com/

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.

The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.

My pictures are about a search for a moment - a perfect moment. To me the most powerful moment in the whole process is when everything comes together and there is that perfect, beautiful, still moment. And for that instant, my life makes sense.

What the artist attempts to do is to try and tell a story. Attempting to give physical expression to a story that's internal.