Chroma #09, 1979
Archival pigment print
120 x 170 cm
Edition of 6
Grey Crawford was born and raised in Southern California, USA, and was one of the first West Coast artists who challenged the photographic medium through his darkroom experiments with both black and white and color photography. After receiving his BA degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, he attended the Claremont Graduate University. It was during 1975-84 where Crawford’s main bodies of works, El Mirage, Umbra, and Chroma were created. Inspired by the rectangular shapes and forms used by the California hard edge painters John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin, Crawford distinguished himself from the popular topographers of that era such as Lewis Baltz. He uniquely infused these geometric forms into his works by utilizing various masking techniques in the darkroom learned in his studies at RIT. His later, revolutionary manipulations of color in the darkroom on photographic paper has allowed Crawford to carve himself a place in art history.
In his series "Chroma” (1978-1984), Grey Crawford uses the same masking technique seen in Umbra. Unlike his earlier works, "Chroma” represented a new departure, as it opened up different possibilities that black and white photography couldn’t. By still using his process of combining images with abstract shapes, the addition of color expanded that reality by how it was associated with another context. In this series of photographs, Crawford reinforces his influences from the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, with his use of color as a means to define space, to the Chicano movement murals that decorated the LA freeways of the 1970’s. Crawford states "I was telling a story with a new language. Piecing it together from a contemporary world, the world that I lived in and not a historical pastiche of form and content. The density of the story could be anything I wanted, varying horizontally across the picture plane, creating depth into the image, adding or subtracting time and its various horizons, or creating a recourse of circular time.” Conceptual color photography in the 1970’s was in its infancy. Crawford used it as a means to propel the image and shapes into a fuller meaning.
