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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

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Gregory Crewdson
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 26
Photographer
University Teacher
Brooklyn
New York
Desire
Metaphor
Fear
Psychological
Art
Landscape
Nature
Anxiety
Using
Photography
Iconography
Interested
Surrogates
American
Metaphors

More quotes by Gregory Crewdson

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We all strive to find moments of clarity, of order.
Gregory Crewdson
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Since a photograph is frozen and mute, since there is no before and after, I don't want there to be a conscious awareness of any kind of literal narrative. And that's why I really try not to pump up motivation or plot or anything like that.
Gregory Crewdson
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I want to privilege the moment.
Gregory Crewdson
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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.
Gregory Crewdson
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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
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I do think that dread is about a certain kind of expectation. And the fact that a picture can never resolve itself the way a movie can - maybe that's a specific kind of dread that becomes associated with a picture.
Gregory Crewdson
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It is really important to have an obsessive need to construct something, to understand something from your own experience.
Gregory Crewdson
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The viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture.
Gregory Crewdson
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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
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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
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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.
Gregory Crewdson
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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
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I think that's the nature of representation. No matter what it will disappoint, it will fail in some way.But that's also part of the magic of art. If every picture met my expectation in exactly the right way, there'd be no mystery there'd be no gap between what's in my head and the picture I make.
Gregory Crewdson
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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My mom just recently reminded me that I used to build these little miniature worlds outside at our country house and populate it with little figures.That whole thing [shooting is] about trying to create a world - there's something very connected to childhood and reverie and daydreaming and fantasy.
Gregory Crewdson