Gregory Crewdson Quotes & Sayings

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

I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there's always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense ... This is what drives you to the next picture. — Gregory Crewdson

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. — Gregory Crewdson

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. — Gregory Crewdson

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. — Gregory Crewdson

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

It's about finding meaning through light. I'm always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange. — Gregory Crewdson

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. — Gregory Crewdson

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 — Gregory Crewdson

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

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. — Gregory Crewdson

I'm interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire — Gregory Crewdson

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. — Gregory Crewdson

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. — Gregory Crewdson

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. — Gregory Crewdson

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