Portrait of an artist

TAKING STOCK: William F. Crawford takes a moment to catch up with the news, in a photograph believed to be a self-portrait (date unknown).

WIILLIAM Crawford was a photographer of prodigious output, and the 5000 surviving images he shot are just the tip of his oeuvre.

But, as with many people, his production was greatest after he retired from the workforce. And it may be that his grief at a trio of family tragedies helped to spur him on.

Born in County Tipperary, Ireland in 1844, William Fitzgerald Crawford was aged 19 when he left for Auckland and 20 when he arrived in May, 1864, “ . . . full of life, longing to see the world . . . quite impressed with the belief that in two years I would make my fortune and return, a hero, to the dear ones at home”.

That wasn’t to be: apart from a couple of visits “home”, Crawford lived his entire adult life in New Zealand.

He made his modest fortune, lost it, then made it back again. And along the way he took thousands and thousands of photographs.

Recording Crawford’s life for the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, former Gisborne historian Sheila Robinson reports that while his early adventures as a bushman and goldminer on the West Coast did not lead to prosperity, survey work and portering did help him develop sturdy hill-climbing muscles for later photographic expeditions around the hills of Poverty Bay.

“Crawford followed the gold rush to Thames as a storekeeper and sent for his fiancée, Mary Augusta Franklin, an Irish-born woman whom he had first met in Auckland,” Robinson says.

Married at Onehunga in September, 1868, the couple first lived in Thames but by 1871 had returned to Auckland to look after a dying relative who recommended Crawford for his own job at R. Whitson and Sons’ Albert Brewery.

Three years later, Whitsons decided to open a branch in the fast-growing town of Gisborne and Crawford was sent to build the brewery and start operations. The first beer was advertised in January 1875, and the following year he bought the business for himself.

Crawford was still in his early 30s when, in 1877, he was elected first mayor of the new borough of Gisborne, an office he was re-elected to at the end of the year.

“For 18 months he and his councillors often met several times in one week as they endeavoured to set in place the amenities that any self-respecting borough expected to provide metalled roads, a reliable water supply and a fire protection service of which Crawford was superintendent,” Robinson reports.

Throwing off the mayoral yokeBy 1878 he was out of the mayoral chains and back on board as a businessman — a career that suffered a brief battering when, in 1882, he became bankrupt after the collapse of the City Of Glasgow Bank.

A year later, however, he was back, building a new brewery and a home beside it on the banks of the Taruheru River. (When that brewery burned down, he built another on the same site in 1895.)

And the increased size of the brewery proved to be handy for more than making beer. Keen on photography since his time in Auckland, Crawford would clamber to the top floor of his new brewery tower to take panoramic shots of the fledgling town of Gisborne.

Parties and tournaments, processions and expeditions, picnics, hui and shows also came under the gaze of his camera, some shot via the wet-plate process, whereby the photographer virtually travelled with his darkroom.

But though that produced beautifully clear images, it was cumbersome and Crawford later worked with a half-plate camera (using the new dry-plate process), in 1884 buying the 10-inch by eight-inch camera that was his new tool of choice.

Not long after this the Crawford family suffered a major blow when youngest son Percy died in 1896, aged just 16, following a riding accident.

That may or may not have been the trigger for William Crawford’s change of lifestyle: in 1897 he sold the brewery to D. J. Barry and though he helped his son Gerald run a stationer’s shop and his brother Daniel run the Albion Club Hotel next door, he sharpened his focus on photography, buying a quarter-plate camera and shooting even more images than before.

“Several hundred large plates, mostly from the 1880s and early 1890s, survive as do several thousand quarter-plates from 1897 on,” Sheila Robinson says.

“He was official recorder for the state funeral of Major Rapata Wahawaha at Waiomatatini in the Waiapu valley in 1897, and there were many occasions when he accompanied visits of parliamentarians to the district or recorded a new building or a flourishing industry.”

Back to IrelandCrawford took a break between 1899 and 1901 when he visited England and Ireland but, not long after his return, once again tragedy struck: in 1903 one of his daughters, Viola, died in a mental hospital at the age of 28, and that same year his by-then deeply depressed wife took her own life.

Again, Crawford focused on his passion. His photographic output was greatest between 1902 and 1912, during which time he set up a studio and promoted himself as a “photographic landscape artist”, though much of his later work was in portraiture.

As Crawford prepared to head back to Britain to see an ailing brother in 1913, the “leading” citizens of Gisborne gave him a farewell banquet and subsequent plaudits that, Robinson says, “someone remarked sounded uncomfortably close to an obituary”.

“In a sense, they proved to be so,” she says. “William Crawford did not return to Gisborne. When he got back to New Zealand it was to live with a daughter (Marion Hawkins) in Auckland, where he died on December 15, 1915.

“His legacy, however, lives on. More than 5000 of Crawford’s photos have survived and the negatives are in the care of Tairawhiti Museum, which is marking the 100th year of his death with a major celebration of his life and work.

“The William F. Crawford collection of photographs is a large gem in the crown of Tairawhiti Museum’s collections, and one wonders what insight we would have into our local past had the descendants of Crawford not saved and shared the negatives with the people of this district,” says museum curator of photography Dudley Meadows.

“We wished to display in this exhibition some of the public’s favourite images as well as showcasing some of the not-so-well-known photographs.

“The quality and quantity of Crawford photographs are such that his work will be shown in museum exhibitions for at least another 100 years.”

• Wm. F. Crawford: Photographic Landscape Artist is on show at Tairawhiti Museum until April 2016.

• Research courtesy Sheila Robinson (from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara The Encyclopedia of New Zealand) and Tairawhiti Museum curator of photography Dudley Meadows.