Coulee Dam Staging Area 1972

Ralston Crawford made this black and white photograph called "Coulee Dam Staging Area" and I just want to climb inside it! It's all steel beams forming triangular portals, like a kid’s construction set grown huge. Crawford seems to be asking, how can forms be both abstract and real? I imagine him there, squinting through his viewfinder, composing the lines and angles, maybe thinking about the formal language of Cubism. He's playing with positive and negative space, light and shadow, creating a dynamic composition that celebrates the beauty of industrial forms. Maybe he felt some kinship between the beams and the lines of a drawing or painting? It’s like a visual puzzle, where the industrial landscape becomes an exercise in seeing. Crawford makes you wonder about the relationship between art, architecture, and the modern world. Artists, like engineers, are always building things—we build on each other's ideas, all of us, building something new together.