Design and Art Australia Online

professional photographer and photolithographer, was born in Scotland. He was in Melbourne by 1859, when he advertised a negative printing service to assist amateur photographers; his studio at 83 Swanston Street is listed in the Melbourne Directory for the following year. Crawford became a council member of the Photographic Society of Victoria in 1860, then moved to Sydney later in the year. In January 1861 he advertised that he was about to leave New South Wales and was selling off remaining stock 'considerably under cost price’: 'a complete set for portraits or views, 10 × 8 [25.4 × 20.3 cm] or under, by Ottewile with Ross lenses. A Captain Fowkes camera for 10 × 8 in the dark box; a double lens stereo-camera, with Ross one-quarter lenses, will take portraits or views instantaneously’, and more. Another disposal sale of photographic equipment was advertised in December from the same address, Whittell’s Buildings, near the Wharf, Bathurst Street.

Soon afterwards Crawford was managing the Adelaide Photographic Company in King William Street, Adelaide, South Australia. There he was noted for cooling his large studio window with running water in summer (to assist short portrait exposure times). In March 1864 his firm advertised photographs of Bishop Short of Adelaide, Bishop Patteson of Melanesia and ministers of the Church of England and other denominations. The following month the South Australian Register praised two cartes-de-visite, 'one representing the outside of the book just presented by the Queen to the South Australian Institute and the other the inside of the volume with the written inscription’. In 1865 he was involved in a legal dispute with Townsend Duryea and Charles Wilson over the newly fashionable sennotype, 'denying both the originality of the sennotype process, and Mr. Duryea’s exclusive possession of the secret’. In 1866 he invited a group of gentlemen to spend an evening at the company’s studio in order to witness his experimental attempts to take photographs with the artificial light of magnesium flash.

Crawford was fond of novelties. He was possibly the first photographer in Australia to provide original photographs for books. Those in George Hamilton 's 1866 horse books, discussed by Robert Holden, may be attributed to his Adelaide Photographic Company because of the photographs the firm soon afterwards produced of Sophia Sinnett 's ink sketches, although Townsend Duryea, another innovative photographer, was photographing drawings for albums and books at about the same time. In the mid 1860s Adelaide possibly had the most innovative photographers in the Australian colonies.

Not all the experiments were considered an unqualified success. Crawford produced single-plate panoramic views of Adelaide taken with a wide-angle lens in 1866, 'a branch of the art little practised in these colonies’, commented the pseudonymous critic 'Sol’ when examples were shown at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. But, 'Sol’ added disparagingly, 'we much doubt their becoming very great favourites with the public if the specimens before us shew the greatest amount of definition that can be obtained in shadow by the process’.

From 1868 Crawford was a photo-lithographer with the South Australian Survey Department. He was one of the two photography judges appointed to the 1870 exhibition of the South Australian Society of Arts (the other was W.C. May ). He died, unmarried, on 29 October 1890.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011