Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]
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.
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.
The reason I teach is because it’s a privileged atmosphere, where you can talk about photographs in a place where the people really care about them. That’s rare and unusual.
What I’m after, what I’ve always been after is a picture that tells a story. I see it all in my head beforehand, and I set out obsessively—maybe even narcissistically—to make it. Very little is improvised in the end, though I am open to serendipity in some details. In part I see what I am doing as exploring the American psyche through the American vernacular landscape, much as Hopper did.
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.
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.
There isn’t a picture that was ever made that doesn’t speak about mortality in some way.
My first impulse is to make the most beautiful picture I can. But then I’m always interested in this idea of a kind of undercurrent in the work… I’m very interested in the uncanny and a way to find something mysterious or terrible within everyday life.
