Quote

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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Gregory Crewdson
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 26
Photographer
University Teacher
Brooklyn
New York
Thinking
Maybe
Call
Word
Accurate
Actors
Uncomfortable
Might
Pictures
Even
Subjects
Never
Objects
Think
Actor

More quotes by Gregory Crewdson

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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
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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
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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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The viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture.
Gregory Crewdson
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I'm not that particularly talented in terms of making anything or - I'm not technically efficient. I certainly don't know how to draw very well or paint, and I'm not good with computers. But I think the thing that I'm good at is willing something into life, no matter what. I do what it takes to get it done.
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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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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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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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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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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We all strive to find moments of clarity, of order.
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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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'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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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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If my pictures are about anything at all, I think it's about trying to make a connection in the world. I see them as more optimistic in a certain way. Even though it's very clear there's a level of sadness and disconnection, I think that they're really about trying to make a connection and almost the impossibility of doing so.
Gregory Crewdson
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Usually I'll drive to certain locations over and over again, over a course of months really. And then it might just be I hit it at the right time, and the right light. And then I might go to that location over and over again, and then what happens in that lag time where - the image sort of locks in - all of a sudden I see it in my mind's eye.
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
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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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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