Beam Exchanges: Grey Crawford and Daniel Rapley

The inaugural Beam Exchanges exhibition brings together two artists experimenting within the medium of photography. 

From 1978–85 Grey Crawford made a series of over 200 hand-printed colour photographs documenting industrial buildings, construction sites and commercial locations around Los Angeles. The images include graphic forms introduced by the artist through a unique process of masking and filtering light during the printing process, a hugely demanding technique that required working in total darkness. 

Daniel Rapley’s Drift series is created through sourcing photographic slides from house clearances. Each image combines two overlaid slides, which are then rephotographed and printed. The artist works through thousands of combinations to find two slides that resonate to create a powerful hybrid image.

While Crawford’s images describe the fringes of 1970s LA as the city expanded into the desert, Rapley’s images frequently draw upon themes of travel from the 1940s onwards and are evidence of our ability to travel increasingly freely throughout the 20th century. In these ways both Crawford and Rapley reference humanity’s dominance of nature in an increasingly globalised world. 

Both sets of images present a dystopian mixed reality that could easily be mistaken as being digitally generated, despite being the result of a craft based process utilising outmoded technology. 

Early Victorian photography was significantly manipulated, artists such as László Moholy-Nagy experimented with photography at the Bauhaus and both Crawford and Rapley continue to explore the possibilities of the medium today. The merging of images, otherworldly colours and floating abstract forms are synonymous with digital aesthetics, but existed long before they became part of everyday life, in our pockets, on our smartphones.