In the Viewing Room: Grey Crawford - Chroma 1978–1985
Until 6th November, 2021
Beam, Nottingham, UK
Plan your visit
Somewhere between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert is Grey Crawford’s virtual world
From the mid 1970s onwards, between the dense urban sprawl of Los Angeles and the Mojave desert to the east of the city, a little known photographer called Grey Crawford could be found documenting the unremarkable urban spaces and buildings of the city.
Armed with a medium format camera and rolls of colour film, Crawford captured overlooked architectural spaces of LA’s urban fabric – parking lots, industrial buildings, disused gas stations, the remains of a failed building site, and unremarkable everyday modernist architecture commonly found in the sprawling hinterlands of the city.
Back in his darkroom, the artist transformed these documentations of everyday LA into something entirely different. Using his own experimental colour printing techniques the artist inserted geometric shapes, lines and gradients into the picture plane. Sometimes these forms are subtly integrated with the architecture itself, sometimes floating on the surface or cutting through the vernacular scenes.
The techniques the artist developed were technically demanding. There was no rule book, the outcomes of the experiments were often unknown. Hundreds of images were made but only a few made the cut. Over the course of the next seven years the artist produced over 200 works using a range of techniques that few, if any, knew how to emulate.
‘I was telling a story in a new language. Piecing it together from a contemporary world, the world that I lived in ... the story could be anything i wanted, varying horizontally across the picture plane, creating depth into an image, adding and subtracting time and its various horizons, or creating a recourse of circular time’
– Grey Crawford
While the art scene in California became a hub for some of the most experimental and forward thinking artists of the decade, Crawford’s techniques were largely unrecognised as an art making process and recognition for his work subsequently suffered.
A BFA in Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology provided the artist with hardcore training in the technical aspects of photography and was followed shortly after by graduate studies at Claremont, now recognised as one of the most important art schools of the 1970s. This heady mix of technical training and artistic education led to a highly innovative body of work.
Inserting a graphic into an image became easily achievable over a decade later in the early 90s with the introduction of desktop computers, scanners and the software like Photoshop, which became commonplace technology by the early 2000s. Crawford’s use of the darkroom in the 70s was certainly innovative and fascinating for those that appreciate the art of colour photographic printing, but is not the most interesting aspect of Crawford’s Chroma series.
Crawford understood that there were infinite possibilities and space beyond the fabric of the picture plane. The artist was imagining a virtual reality long before the technologists realised it through the digital revolution, seven years before Steve Jobs launched Apple and Bill Gates Windows. Some forty years later Crawford’s images make sense to a generation that has grown up with digital technology and the virtual world being a part of everyday life.
The fluidity between what is real and what is virtual is now commonplace but back in the late 70s it was a concept that for many would have been impossible to grasp.
Between architectural spaces and art forms – Grey Crawford's influences and peers.
These mysterious images made little sense to the thriving LA art scene of the 70s and early 80s. Photography was barely recognised as an art form by curators in major museums and galleries, and art dealers had no market for the work either. Crawford’s radical work was not widely appreciated by an American photography scene preoccupied with classical ideas.
Grey Crawford was not simply an outlier, more of an artist on the fringes of a thriving scene, artistically close to his peers and influences but his innovative use of his medium kept him on the edges.
His use of colour and geometric composition resonates with the artist John McLaughlin, the pioneer of hard edge painting, and painter Karl Benjamin’s geometric abstract canvases, which the artist cites as one of his early influences. The ‘transitional fades’ that recur throughout the Chroma series have the essence of a Larry Bell sculpture but keep their distance from the perceptual visual effects of California’s Light and Space movement. The Mexican architect Luis Barragán, also an influence, combined the strict geometry of modernist architecture with planes of colour that in places could be mistaken for Crawford’s work.
While Crawford’s oeuvre is now finding its home in major museum collections, back in the 1970s and 80s it sat on the fringes of many genres. Crawford’s work is highly relatable to sculpture, installation and site specific work, but was outside the history of photography.
This period in California's history is groundbreaking in both arts and technology but Grey Crawford’s story is a stark reminder of the inherent conservatism that existed and perhaps still remains. One of the most technologically advanced locations in the world, still had traditional ideas about what constituted art.
Become a supporter of the first comprehensive monograph of Grey Crawford’s early photographic artworks.
CHROMA #29 (1978)
LIMITED EDITION PRINT
Archival ink on Hahnemuhle
11 x 14 inches (27 x 35cm)To be published by Beam Editions, Autumn 2021