Chroma, 1978–84
In his series Chroma, 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.