Grey Crawford went under the radar for years, unnoticed amongst his contemporaries and rarely discussed in conversations of conceptual photography. Beam Editions, a gallery based in the halls of Primary, seeks to bring attention to the artist with a survey of works completed between 1978-1985...
Like large TV screens glowing with the deep penetrating colours of dusty Los Angeles landscapes, Grey Crawford’s photographic series Chroma 1978-1985 spoke of its own world of vernacular, rustic and abstract themes. The work plays with the boundaries between abstraction and realism, inserting geometric shapes into the pictures to create a highly engaging image. Through an experimental series that plays with form and framing of scenes, Crawford’s work brings up questions of progress, modernity, environment and time. Visiting the exhibition in the little gallery space at Beam Editions on a dark rainy night highlighted the inner world of this work, with its strong ties to time and place.
Chroma was created in Los Angeles from 1978 to 1985. The photo series depicts scenes of rough concrete passageways between modernist buildings and barren desert landscapes, through a curious combination of crumbling rugged materials and sharp defined lines. The buildings are very often early twentieth century modernist ones with an American appearance which gives a strong thematic quality to them. Crawford is intensely interested in time and place, and the location of these pieces is especially important to him because they are of his hometown as he remembered it as a young man.
Alongside the exhibition, Beam hosted a talk with the artist himself to discuss the photo series, offering insight into the artist’s personal ideas behind his work. Crawford explained that Los Angeles was in a period of great change and constant construction and deconstruction during the seventies and eighties. The architecture of Los Angeles is a big focus in his work, exploring new ideas about construction and form with a rejection of traditional notions of beauty. He explained that he felt the desire to “bring order to the world” in his art. Crawford felt the world was chaotic, that his childhood was being destroyed. Beauty is present in his work, but like with the modernist architecture he chose to focus on, it rejected classical notions of beauty and focused on far more personal and vernacular subjects. In this way his work is very much a reaction to the world and an experiment in image making and city making through an exploration of identity.
The exploration of the construction of images is also a big focus in his work. He experimented with the creation of photographs and the constitution of a scene, questioning photography as an art form; he aimed to push the medium and ask what it could become. At the time of the creation of the photographs, analogue was the only technique available. Crawford had to develop his own experimental techniques to craft the photos, creating these techniques through experimentation, inserting colour prints into the negative and then generating the images by hand.
He explained the great difficulties involved in this; he would have to calculate the negative of the desired colour to ensure that he created the correct colour when the work was printed. The physicality of this process presents the photos as objects, rather than just images of scenes. Rather than being simply literal representations, there lies a sense of abstraction in the photos. There’s also an element of history to Crawford’s photographs, reminding the viewer of how photography has changed from being a painstakingly analogue process to being able to produce something much quicker through digital means.
Crawford’s work displayed in Chroma 1978-1985 shows an understanding of where the points of focus are in an image for a viewer, with Crawford deliberately playing with this sense of perspective. His use of colourful dots and lines to cover up areas of focus and flatten the perspective of the image allows us to contemplate the scene as a whole, rather than getting sucked into specific details. These dots, lines and shapes deliberately orchestrate our perception of the image. By adding these shapes and forms that play off the details of the photographs, his work deals directly with questions about photography as an art form.
Crawford has only fairly recently received the acclaim that he deserves, having been relatively obscure for the last forty years due to how radical and experimental his work was considered to be when it was created. Despite the fact the things he often chose to photograph were by no means classically beautiful, he brought order to a chaotic and ever changing world within these photographs.
Grey Crawford: Chroma 1978-1985 is currently available in the Viewing Room at Beam Gallery, Primary until Sunday 7 November.
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