El Mirage #1 (1976) and El Mirage #46 (1976)

Crawford’s understanding of time is inseparable from place. Southern California’s landscape, with its intense, high contrast light effects and vast deserts, instilled in him an acute awareness of duration and change. In the desert, he notes, one experiences “consistent contact with the earth – feeling grounded.” One can also see for miles — a spatial openness that heightens the perception of time passing and plays with scale. His later move to Rochester, New York, for undergraduate studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) introduced a contrasting temporal environment. There, seasonal shifts, dense vegetation, and the city’s deep photographic history, where Kodak and the George Eastman Museum were located, created a sense of layered time. “You really get the sense of history,” he recalls. He continues to describe how walking on leaf-covered ground created a separation, feeling ungrounded. It seemed to be like stepping through accumulated years of experience rather than touching the present moment directly. This juxtaposition between environments — the expansive immediacy of the Southern Californian desert and the historical density of the Northeast — shaped his perception of photography as a medium that could both record and construct temporal experience.

In the early 1970s at RIT, Crawford’s education unfolded within an intensely collaborative ecosystem. Scientists, photographers, printmakers, and conceptual artists intersected daily, blurring disciplinary boundaries. For Crawford, technical training in chemistry and optics did not restrict creative exploration but instead expanded it. Understanding the behavior of silver molecules, for example, allowed him to experiment with toning processes and alternative color effects in novel ways. The darkroom became his laboratory, where he could spend many hours experimenting.

Equally influential at RIT was the broader, open, artistic environment that gave him access to courses in philosophy, history and collaborative studio work like at the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW); where artists would be working with found object collaging and self-made photo books, challenging the popular automatic nature of taking the snapshot. Co-founders Nathan and Joan Lyons fostered a culture of experimentation in which photography was treated not merely as a recording tool but as a conceptual medium. Betty Hahn and Bea Nettles to name a few of the greats, used mixed-media and photographic processes such as stitching, kitchen chemistry and sculpture. Albert Paley, another pioneering artist, expanded the possibilities of metalworking on an architectural scale.

Crawford recalls being asked, “What more could be done with a photograph?”as a material object, as a narrative structure, or as form of visual language, realizing “I better start thinking a bit deeper here!” Fast forward to today, visual artists in photography are similarly challenging the instantaneous nature of the taking a selfie with making images using mixed-media and alternative processes that slows the creative act.

This collaborative atmosphere continued during Crawford’s graduate studies at the prestigious Claremont Graduate School in 1975, where he also became the artists’ photographer, given his rigorous technical training at RIT. Crawford was asked to document artists’ works for their own records and exhibition posters, passing through the studios of American pioneering artists of their crafts such as Sam Maloof (furniture design), Paul Soldner (ceramics) and Michael Brewster (acoustic sculpture) to name a few. However, it was photographing the performance arts and installations—ephemeral practices— that profoundly altered his understanding of time. Through this experience, Crawford came to understand photography as a time-based art form, extending moments that would otherwise vanish. “Once it's done, it's over, and the only thing left is the photograph. Wow. Well, why don't I go to the desert and start working with me in that same vein.”