Much like his paintings and prints, Ralston Crawford’s photography emphasizes the lines, forms, and shadows of industrial environments
Ralston Crawford’s Staging Area, Coulee Dam, 1972. Gelatin silver print, 13 × 19-1/8 inches. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc., 2005.27.2609.
Artist Ralston Crawford dabbled in photography before World War II, using his 1938 shots of dock workers in Florida and Louisiana as source material for his painting Ships and Sailors. Then the destruction he witnessed during and after the war fueled a new desire to use the camera to explore the tension between form and chaos, creation and ruin.
He observed the wreckage of downed planes while serving with the Air Force; he was at Bikini Atoll in 1946, on assignment with Fortune, when an atomic bomb was tested. He portrayed its obliterating power in paintings of fragmented, melted metal. Then in 1951, he traveled to Europe and was shocked by the lingering destruction in Cologne. He photographed the hulking shapes of rubble that haunted its streets and used them as the basis for a series of lithographs that contrasted this devastation to the rigid angles of New York’s Third Avenue elevated train. Soon he moved away from using photography as source material and engaged with it as an art form in its own right.
“He was a superb painter and printmaker, and actually worked in film in addition to being really serious with the camera,” said Keith F. Davis, senior curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. “He made thousands of photographs over forty years. So photography was really central to his way of seeing and his larger artistic practice, but it hasn’t gotten much attention recently.”
The Nelson-Atkins Museum is exploring this lesser-known side of the artist in Structured Vision: The Photographs of Ralston Crawford, on view through April 7, 2019. Timed forty years after his death in 1978, it features sixty black-and-white photographs joined by prints and films showing the diversity and relationships between media in his career. Some of these photographs have never been published. An accompanying monograph, authored by Davis and released by Yale University Press, further highlights the museum’s holdings of his photographs.
While the Nelson-Atkins has exhibited photography since 1936, this focus was bolstered by the 2005 acquisition of the Hallmark Photographic Collection and the 2007 Bloch Building expansion, which includes dedicated exhibition space for photography. “The Nelson-Atkins collection of photography is one of the top in the nation, with a depth and breadth that both scholars and visitors have enjoyed for many years,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, CEO and director of the Nelson-Atkins. Zugazagoitia added that the “Ralston Crawford exhibition was made possible through Keith Davis’s close relationship with Crawford’s son.” Davis met Neelon Crawford over two decades ago, and in 2015 that connection led to a purchase by the Hall Family Foundation of sixteen Crawford photographs which were donated to the museum, joined by Neelon’s gift of another 125.
Courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Although Crawford was a prolific photographer, he wasn’t part of its scene, and didn’t exhibit as widely as with his paintings. Yet like his paintings, such as Overseas Highway (1939), which shows the 113-mile link to the Florida Keys stretching into infinity, his photographs often examined modern industry and the built environment. Whether the huge concrete curves of grain elevators in Buffalo, New York, or steel components waiting to be fitted onto the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, he brought an eye for geometry and tension. “His work is always a combination of being faithful to subject matter and perceiving it in a structural, formal manner,” Davis said.
versity of these subjects, ranging from weathered and torn advertisements, to ships and water. This maritime interest goes back to Crawford’s childhood. Born in 1906 in Ontario, he grew up in Buffalo, where his father was a ship captain on the Great Lakes. He even went to sea himself during a short stint with the United Fruit Company before disembarking in Los Angeles in 1927 and studying art. Later that year, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and was deeply influenced by the paintings he saw in the collection of Albert C. Barnes (founder of the Barnes Foundation). In particular, Paul Cézanne’s distillation of the world into color and shape was a major inspiration in his early hard-edged paintings of factories, bridges, and other engineering feats.
Crawford’s photographs also have this appreciation for lines and shapes in twentieth-century life. When he lived in New York City, he was drawn to the lattice-like shadows of a trash can and the collision of screaming tabloid headlines at a newsstand. When in the 1940s and ’60s he journeyed around the country for teaching gigs, he captured the twisted vehicles in an automobile scrapyard in Boulder, Colorado, and the layered mechanics of trains in a Duluth, Minnesota, rail yard. His insatiable wanderlust regularly took him abroad, where he was awed by the towering architecture of ancient Egyptian sites and the frenzied bull rings of Spain.
Where he most loved to photograph was New Orleans. “Of all the places in the world that he traveled to, he went back to New Orleans far more often than anywhere else,” Davis said. “He went there almost every year. And that fascination began with jazz culture, then expanded to include the African-American communities themselves: the people, houses, street activities, the cemeteries. Most of the rest of his work is much more formal and abstract and personal, but the New Orleans work began out of a documentary intention.
Unlike the almost abstracted details of war rubble and train engines, his New Orleans photographs are more about being a witness than an interpreter. He joined brass bands parading on the streets, and he frequented jazz clubs, then followed the party back to musicians’ homes, where he took intimate portraits of their jam sessions. He seemed to have a curiosity for every corner of the city, from old shotgun houses to sun-washed marble in cemeteries. Following his cancer diagnosis in 1971, he kept traveling to New Orleans. A 1975 photograph of a street car reveals shadowy faces of passengers framed by a grid of windows; another from a cemetery shows a vase tipped over, its withered flowers slithering between two stones carved with names. Even in these final years, he was finding fresh perspectives on the familiar and considering how the camera could challenge our ways of seeing. With each image, he reflected on the inevitability of decay and change, and placed a value on these fleeting moments.
