Born and raised in Southern California, Grey Crawford was one of the first artists from the 1970s generation to use the photographic medium as a conceptual tool, pushing the boundaries of traditional photography through his darkroom experiments in both black-and-white and color photography. Between 1975 and 1984, he created some of his most significant bodies of work, including El Mirage, Umbra, and Chroma. Inspired by the basic shapes used by the California hard-edge painters John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin, Crawford distinguished himself early on from the popular topographers of that era such as Lewis Baltz. He uniquely integrated these geometric forms into his photographs using various masking techniques—learned in his studies at Rochester Institute of Technology—that allowed separate exposures in any areas he selected, going from white to grey to solid black. Crawford's later revolutionary manipulations of color in the darkroom on photographic paper enabled him to carve out a place for himself in art history.

Grey Crawford (*1951 in Los Angeles, California) received his BA degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, before attending Claremont Graduate University. His rich archive of works was only recently rediscovered in 2017 and has since been incorporated into the collections of the Getty Museum and Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo among others. His work continues to be shown in international institutions such as Turku Art Museum, Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear, and Darmstadt Designhaus. Crawford’s publications include Finding Bones (Kehrer Verlag, 2017), El Mirage (Hatje Cantz, 2018), and Chroma 1978–85 (Beam Editions, 2022). He lives and works in Los Angeles and Denver.