Grey Crawford

Grey Crawford: Chroma, 1978–85, Vol 1

Publisher: Beam Editions, May 2022
Texts: Timothy Persons, Lyle Rexer, Hannah Glauner, and Ashley Gallant
Format: 24 x 30 cm
Pages: 152, Hardcover
Language: English
ISBN 978-1-7399865-3-7

Grey Crawford. Chroma, 1978–85, Vol 1
In 1978 Grey Crawford created a body of colour photographic work that was so radical in its aesthetic and technique that few people to this day understand how it was made.
Chroma documents late 70s Los Angeles in a period of radical urban transformation. Scenes of vernacular architecture, demolition sites and everyday places are contrasted with graphic forms that float on the surface and sit within the image.
A student at Claremont and LA native, Crawford’s work shows the influence of radical Californian painters such as Karl Benjamin and John McLaughlin in the medium of photography.
While Light and Space, Minimalism, and Geometric Abstraction, existed firmly within painting and sculpture, Crawford showed the possibilities of photography as an art form and blurred the boundaries between photography, sculpture and installation.
Crawford’s work holds an important place in art history and its visionary aesthetic remains relevant and more familiar than ever in the 21st century.
Featuring essays by Timothy Persons, Lyle Rexer, Hannah Glauner, and Ashley Gallant, and a detailed, technical description of the process used to create the images in the darkroom by the artist himself.

El Mirage

Published by: Hatje Cantz, 2018
Format: Hardcover

Artist: Grey Crawford

Texts: Timothy Persons, Lyle Rexler

Language: English

ISBN 978-3-7757-4518-5

Grey Crawford created his series El Mirage from 1975–78, in the Mojave Desert in California. The photographs feature configurations that were constructed from a contrast of materials, glass, steel and aluminum sheets, combined together to pull upon their sheer weight and balance to expose their natural vulnerabilities. El Mirage reflects upon the artist’s interaction with nature and embodies the spirit of performance and land art during the 1970s. These unseen photographs from 40 years ago are being published for the first time.

Besides the black-and-white photos that Crawford is famous for, this volume also contains color photography, an introduction by Timothy Persons, and an essay by Lyle Rexer.

Finding Bones

Published by: Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2017
Format: Hardcover
Texts: Timothy Persons, Lyle Rexler
Artists: Grey Crawford
Language: English

ISBN 978-3-86828-779-0

Finding Bones is a book introducing a newly rediscovered body of work by Grey Crawford. It’s an anthology of photographs that embody the creative spirit that was prevalent throughout the Los Angeles art scene at the time. Southern California in the early 1970’s was an island of its own creation. A mixture of surf and sea, concrete highways winding around an ever-changing cultural climate that was challenging our assumptions of what art is. Crawford chooses his selected backgrounds with a sense of austerity as a means for introducing these hard edge shapes and using them as the building blocks for his own language.

The thirty photographs are silver vintage prints, using Crawford’s hand masking technique in the darkroom to create a new synthesis of imagery and the abstract. (From the forword by Timothy Persons)