Bio:

Born in Denver in 1957, Tom Crawford is a photo-based artist living in New York City.  He earned a B.A. in Media and Politics from New York University. In the 1980s he edited documentary films and made his own abstract films.  As an editor at the Standby Program, he helped provide video artists with access to state-of-the-art video and digital effects technology.  In the 1990s he earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University.    

Crawford’s current photo-based artwork uses satellite photos of vast residential and industrial settings, all rearranged with Photoshop, to create entirely new urban landscapes.  Many are overlaid with enlarged and carefully camouflaged hand tools that connect urban environments with hammers, saws, and shovels once used to make them.  Earlier work from his USGS Map Project (2017-2020) uses historical contour maps from the 1950s.  These prints show topographic data, exquisite pen-and-ink drawings, and tableaus of unexpected shapes all at the same time. By blurring boundaries between landscape photography, topography, and abstract art, his work re-imagines how landscapes can be seen as an art form.

In 2025 Crawford was a winner of Soho Photo Gallery’s International Portfolio Competition, and was included in Photolucida’s Top 200 Critical Mass. His aerial landscapes have been shown at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans, Cape Cod Museum of Art, and Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts. His art prints have been in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Dallas, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Portland, and San Francisco.  In addition to making art, Crawford has a psychotherapy practice in Brooklyn, NY.