The whole reason I make these pictures is for those moments of clarity. For that single moment, everything seems to make sense in my world. And I think we all look for that in our lives, because our lives are generally filled with chaos and confusion and disorder and complication.

Gregory Crewdson

Categorized in : Thinking Confusion Single Mom

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

everyday photography time

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

photography hope beauty

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

photography beautiful beauty

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

photography beautiful inspirational

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

Gregory Crewdson

tasks artist trying

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

light photography art

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

sadness beauty love

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

artist expression giving

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

nature photography art

I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me.

Gregory Crewdson

quality twilight wish

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

Gregory Crewdson

obsessive important needs

I'm very moved by the fact that people are drawn into the pictures and that they do bring their own history and their own interpretation to the photograph. I think that's why they work in a certain way.

Gregory Crewdson

people way thinking

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

photography artist father

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

photography memories past

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

exotic landscape desire

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

Gregory Crewdson

viewers projects narrative

For all the talk of my pictures being narratives or that they're about storytelling, there's really very little actually happening in the pictures. One of the few things I always tell people in my pictures is that I want less - give me something less.

Gregory Crewdson

want giving people

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.

Gregory Crewdson

twilight rose reality

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

mystery answers want

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.

Gregory Crewdson

ambition perfect way