Gregory Crewdson Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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 viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture.

In "Twilight," the narratives are more literal, and the event is much more spectacular. The pictures in "Beneath the Roses" are much more psychological and grounded in reality.

You have this ambition to make something perfect, exactly right. Of course, necessarily, it fails in some way and you have to accept that for what it is, and then you're on to the next thing.

I want to privilege the moment.

We all strive to find moments of clarity, of order.

I was really fixated when I was a child. Again my mother was just talking to me about this, about how I would how try to get details exactly right. I guess I was always very persistent.

There's a parallel between me going through these enormous efforts to try to make a moment that means something - and in a way, the figures are doing the same thing. There is that parallel, for sure.

I think maybe the figures - that's a good word - the figures in my pictures are stand-ins for my own need to make a connection.

I never know what to call the subjects in my pictures because I'm uncomfortable with the word actor. I think maybe subjects might be more accurate - or maybe even more accurate is objects.

Making that final commitment is really hard. Because once you decide to move forward, it becomes a whole process which is really hard to stop.

What's important to me is that there's a necessary alienation between me and the subject. I don't want to know them well. I don't want to have any intimate contact with them.