I read yesterday of the death, age 83, of Geoffrey Crawley, and wasn’t intending to write about it as I didn’t feel I had anything to add to what had already been published, particularly by the BJP and Amateur Photographer – he worked for both. The twenty years he spent as editor of the BJP, from around 1967 to 1987 were perhaps its best years within living memory, although not commercially.
I can’t remember ever having met him, but as a very occasional contributor and letter writer to the BJP, I did talk with him a few times on the phone and received several letters from him, including a very nice personal reply following a complaint I made about a rather insane review the magazine had printed by Ainslie Ellis (1920-1997.)
Like many photographers I made use of the developer formulae which he contributed to the British Journal of Photography Annual, the whole ‘FX’ series of fine grain and acutance developers, some of which, such as Acutol and Acutol-S were commercially marketed.
As well as the magazine, he also edited the annual from 1967. In 1988, which I think was the last issue, it made the proud claim to being the oldest photographic annual in the world, first appearing as a wall calender in 1860, and then as a pocket book supplement to the magazine in 1861. You can read or download the 1898 issue (long out of copyright) made available by the University of Toronto.
It’s interesting to re-read the two page editorial in the 1988 issue by Crawley on advances in technology and how these will effect the future of photography – he notes that the “keynote of the next few years… could well turn out to be the increasing use of photography as a notebook in everyday life and particularly in leisure activities.” But writing in 1987, the article nowhere mentions the idea of digital imaging – how quickly things were to change in that respect.
The 1988 annual had another great figure from the last century of British photography as picture editor, Colin Osman, noted as a photo historian but also as the financial supporter for the crucial years of the magazine ‘Creative Camera.’ I was very pleased to have four of my pictures included in the picture section, along with work by many other photographers, including David Hoffman, Anna Fox, Tom Wood, Crispin Hughes, Mike Seabourne, Barry Frydlender, John Blakemore and many others.
One of the strangest stories which Crawley was involved in was the 1917 Cottingley Faires hoax, and it was an article on PetaPixel about this that made me change my mind and write this post. As Michael Zhang notes, it’s interesting that so many people were taken in by these pictures (though they were not as he suggests “in the early days of photography” but when it was 78 years old.)
The hoax, carried out by two girls aged 10 and 16, was a very amateur affair. That people believed them was simply because they wanted to believe them, not that they were in any way believable – to any unprejudiced eye they were obviously fake. What Crawley did was to show in detail exactly how they had been made, and to gain the confidence of Elsie Wright and enable her to at last confess to the truth of the matter.
I contacted the BJP, I suppose sometime around the late 60’s early 70’s about a slip in the quantities in one of the FX developers and was supprised to be speaking the Mr Crawley.
We had a long conversation about the developers and in particular the cost of pinocrytol yellow (sorry about the spelling) as a desentiser.
It was a memorable conversation with a delightfully open and supportive gentleman.
James