Chris Crawford, Fort Wayne Photographer
by Dan Wagner
All Photos © Chris Crawford 2021
Born and bred in Waynedale, a part of the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana that was once a small town, photographer Chris Crawford has devoted his life’s work to elevating his seemingly mundane hometown of Fort Wayne into someplace special. From portraits of people from all walks of life, to rundown buildings, abandoned artifacts, and poignant signage – Crawford’s work is a testament to both his town and to his own efforts to survive. After ten-plus years of viewing Crawford’s work, and reading his posts on photo forums, I decided the time was ripe to interview him.
DW: Chris, since joining the Rangefinder Forum around 2010, I’ve been a fan of your work. Before I get into specifics, I’d like to ask how and when you got interested in photography?
CC: I got into photography as a young kid. I was around seven years old, when my parents gave me one of those crappy plastic fixed-focus 35mm cameras that used to be given away as “free gifts” from companies if you bought something. They gave it to me, and I loved taking pictures. I still have it!
Around the same time, my dad bought an Olympus OM-G 35mm SLR, for himself. He was never into photography seriously, but back in 1983, point-n-shoot cameras weren’t very good, and my mom wanted the family to have something capable of shooting decent snapshots of the kids. Intrigued, I asked my father to teach me how to use it. When I was 11, he bought a second OM-G for me. I had it until I was16, when I totaled it along with my first car.
When I got to high school, I mentioned to a teacher that I was into photography. She told me to go talk to Mr. Goss, the art teacher. He told me that he taught photography classes as part of the school’s art program, and signed me up for the class the following year. It was too late for me to get in that year, but he told me if I came by his classroom after school, he’d teach me to develop black and white film. He also let me use the darkroom after school. Don Goss was an incredible art teacher. He taught at the same school for 56 years, and many of his former students, including photojournalists Peter and David Turnley, went on to become professional photographers. Mr. Goss got me into shooting black and white and later encouraged me to attend art school.
DW: Coming back to the Rangefinder Forum (RFF), I see you have your own sub-forum under Coffee with Mentors. Considering the wealth of information, and diverse subject matter in your posts, it’s really convenient having a forum area for members to interact with you. What has the experience been like for you?
CC: Its been nice having all of my posts and tutorials in one place on RFF, and I’ve gotten a lot of great responses to the how-to articles I’ve written and posted there.
I’m happy to share my knowledge with my friends on RFF. Many years ago, when my son, Mack came to live with me, I was struggling to support us while working on a master’s degree. We were so poor that I couldn’t afford to buy anything for him on Christmas. A couple of the moderators on RFF found out and secretly took up a collection from the forum’s members to help us. I was able to buy Mack a computer, and he started teaching himself programming and 3D graphics. He ended up receiving a scholarship to study computer science at Purdue University’s Fort Wayne campus. Now, he’s 24-years-old and working as a software engineer and doing illustration work for aerospace companies. RFF’s kindhearted members played a big role in helping him get where he is today!
DW: People familiar with your photography know how much you love and are inspired by your hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The photos of Fort Wayne on your website, and Instagram are compelling. The city looks like it’s been frozen in time from the 1950s. What makes Fort Wayne so special to you?
CC: Fort Wayne isn’t special in the traditional sense. It’s a very ordinary place. That’s what makes it special. There’s no shortage of people documenting places like New York, or doing landscape photography in Yosemite, or the Grand Canyon. In contrast, fewer photographers devote their careers to shooting the Midwest. On the surface, there’s nothing here to document, it’s so ordinary, normal, and boring! Even the photographers who live here think so. Many of them travel west to shoot landscape photography because in their words, “There’s nothing here worth photographing.” Yet places like Indiana are historically and culturally significant. From my perspective, to understand American culture, one must examine the Midwest.
As for Fort Wayne looking frozen in time, I think a lot of that comes from the fact that I do a lot of my photographs in the Waynedale area. Waynedale is where I grew up, and where I ended up later in life. I live in the same house my mother grew up in. She inherited it from her mother, and sold it to my son. My parents live down the street from me in the house I grew up in.
Located a few miles southwest of Fort Wayne, the small town of Waynedale was founded in the early 1920s. In 1957, the town’s residents voted to be annexed by Fort Wayne, which by that time had grown toward Waynedale. Despite Waynedale being part of Fort Wayne, which is Indiana’s second largest city, it still looks like a small town.
DW: In terms of photography stores, commercial photographers, and galleries, what is the photographic scene like in Fort Wayne?
CC: There isn’t much of a scene. The last camera store closed a couple years ago after the owner retired. That was a big loss, because it really was the only place where professional photographers hung out. I bought a lot of stuff from them and tried to support them. The owner’s kids didn’t want to take it over, and he didn’t think it was viable long-term because so much business was going to online stores. This reality was compounded by the fact that many people were ditching cameras in favor of cellphones.
DW: How have the people in Fort Wayne responded to your work? Do they enjoy being photographed?
CC: Some do, some don’t. Working class people are usually very supportive. Many are happy to let me photograph them and the places where the live, work, and play. They often tell me that it’s neat to see someone local doing artwork centered on our community. Middle class people are often suspicious, and act like I’m a potential criminal photographing stuff to steal later, or they’re concerned that I might get rich off the photo I take of their house, barn, or whatever. I find most of those people less photographically interesting, as well. Too concerned with appearances, and status, they all look the same, live in the same cookie-cutter houses, dress the same, and even act the same.
DW: You seem equally accomplished at shooting color and black and white. Do you have a preference? And what percentage of your work is film versus digital?
CC: All of my color work is digital and my B&W work is all film. For most of my career, I did very little color for my fine-art work. Whereas my commercial work was almost 100% color. I didn’t consider my color work to be very good. I eventually decided that I was going to teach myself to do color, and spent several years practicing. I’m still practicing, and believe I have a lot to learn to be great with color – although I like the work I’m doing now a lot.
The decision to shoot color or B&W depends on the subject. Some things I think will be more interesting in color and some things in B&W.
DW: Briefly, what is your process for shooting and developing black and white?
CC: My B&W work is all done with traditional black & white film, which I develop myself. Virtually all of my B&W work now is done with 35mm Kodak Tmax 400 developed in D-76 1+1. I scan my negatives and edit them in Photoshop to set the tonality I want, and print them with an Epson printer. Because of health issues, I stopped doing prints in the darkroom twenty years ago. Despite having a good darkroom ventilation system, breathing the chemicals evaporating off the trays was causing respiratory problems. I suspect that my lungs were damaged somewhat by that, because since then I have been very prone to nasty respiratory infections.
DW: Same question for shooting color.
CC: My color work is all digital. I stopped shooting color film because there was no place to get it developed. To do color developing right, you need to be able to control temperatures to within one-quarter of a degree, which is near impossible when the process is done at 100 degrees. All the pro labs in Indiana closed over a decade ago. Back in 2011, I took a trip to New Mexico and shot 40 rolls of 120 size color transparency film. I sent it to a well-regarded pro lab in Chicago and they scratched a bunch of the film. That was the end of it for me. I went one hundred percent digital for color.
For my digital work, I shoot everything RAW. Even snapshots of my cat. You lose so much image quality shooting JPEG. With every digital camera I have owned, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, JPEGs have none of the fine detail resolution that you can get from a properly processed RAW file. The extra work is worth it to me.
I use Lightroom Classic CC to do all of my RAW processing. Afterward I move the files to Photoshop CC for any fine-tuning, dodging and burning, etc.
DW: I notice that a high proportion of your work features photographs with the American flag and various signage. Please share your thoughts on this. And what other themes or subject matter are you most drawn to?
CC: The flag and other patriotic imagery and the religious signs I often photograph are a deeply rooted part of the culture in the Midwest. You can’t document life here without that. People display the flag to show their pride in being Americans and their love of country.
The religious signs are different. They’re not just saying “I’m a Christian.” The purpose is to convert people, or to inspire others to become more religious. I’ve often wondered, does that work? You see a sign posted along a road that says something like “Sin has an AWFUL COST, it’s REPENT OR PAY!” or “Troubled? Try Prayer!” I wonder if anyone has ever stopped sinning, or started going to church after seeing something like that? A lot of people must think it works, because such signs are common. The Midwest is a very conservative, religious place.
DW: How do you feel when you take a photo you’re really pleased with? Why do you love photography?
CC: I fell in love with photography when I was a kid. It was neat being able to make a photo of something I found interesting, and keeping the memory of that time, place, or thing forever preserved in a print.
One of the best things about photography is that I have met a lot of interesting people. Ordinary people, people no one notices, but who have interesting stories to tell. In many cases, I’d hear from members of their families who found their photos on my website.
People like Sterling Hall Sr., a disabled man who lived with his mom and his tiny dog on Fort Wayne’s working-class northwest side. I was photographing something in the neighborhood and as I was walking back to my car, I heard his little dog growling and barking. I yelled back at the dog “My cat could EAT you!” The dog was standing under a wheelchair and the man in the wheelchair asked me what I was photographing. I talked to him and he told me that he had a lot of health problems, and had recently had one of his legs amputated. He asked me to take a picture of him and his dog. A couple weeks later, I took him an exhibition quality print. I left it with his mother, who said he was sick and was sleeping. A few months later, his daughter emailed me to tell me that he had died. She said he loved the photo I made of him and showed it to everyone he knew, and she thanked me for bringing him some joy in his life. I was saddened to hear of his death, but happy that I had made a small difference in his life.
DW: What photo gear are you currently using? Do you have a favorite camera, lens, and film?
CC: I’ve owned a lot of different gear over the years. Right now, I am using Olympus Micro Four Thirds cameras for my color work, and Leica 35mm cameras for my black and white.
For my color work, I used Canon full-frame cameras for many years. Unfortunately, my health problems made it hard to carry heavy DSLR gear. Even if I only carried a camera and one zoom lens (I used a Canon 5DmkII and 24-105mm zoom most of the time), it was hard for me to handhold the camera due to its weight and size.
Fortunately, the m4/3 gear is wonderful for me. The Olympus OM-D E-M1 mark II body is tiny and light, and sports a fully weatherproofed professional body. Even with the relatively large 12-40mm f2.8 Olympus Pro zoom, it’s easy for me to handhold. I don’t think I’ve given up much in image quality with the smaller sensor, and the 16x20 prints I make with this gear sell well and look great.
For B&W I’ve owned and used a number of different camera systems over the past 30 years, such as Olympus OM, Nikon, Canon, Mamiya 6, Mamiya 645, Leica, and Hasselblad. I’ve gotten great photographs from all of them. Any good system will produce wonderful results in the right hands. The name on the equipment doesn’t matter that much to me.
Right now I’m shooting mostly 35mm film in Leica cameras. I was gifted a Leica IIIf and some lenses a couple of years ago by a friend on Range Finder Forum. I’d shot with Leica’s M-series cameras before, but had been forced to sell it all after I stopped teaching. I’d never used the screw-mount Leicas previously, and quickly fell in love with the IIIf. I ended up buying a second IIIf body and extra lenses. Last year I was able to get back into the M-system. I think I still like the IIIf best because of the way their small size fit my hands.
DW: I love the Learn From Me section of your website. The subsection titled Personal Lessons, Shooting Techniques, Digital Editing Tutorials, Film Processing Tutorials, Resources for Teachers, Framing Tutorial, Portfolio Reviews, and Thoughts on Photography are excellent. Please share your thoughts on this section.
CC: That got its start because I’d written many long, detailed responses to technical questions people asked on the Range Finder Forum and other web forums. I realized that the knowledge I was sharing was something people were having a hard time finding elsewhere.
At the time I was struggling to support myself, and my son, while also giving my knowledge freely to people much better off than we were. It was hard because I have a lot of serious health problems that make working a regular job difficult, and I was raising my son alone with no child support from his mother.
By putting the tutorials on my website along with a “Donate” button, I began to earn some money for my efforts. Eventually, it got so big that I built a separate website just for my tutorials, and began adding videos, too. The response to them has been fantastic. Many generous photographers have expressed their appreciation, and become a big part of my income as an artist. People email me all the time telling me that my tutorials make complex technical stuff easier to understand.
DW: What are some of your other creative interests, and how have they shaped your life and photography?
CC: I love history and literature. I actually have a master’s degree in literature, and worked as a high school English teacher and a school librarian prior to my health issues getting in the way. I own more than 2000 books. Most of the non-fiction I read is Roman, European, Russian, and Middle Eastern history. I also read a lot of art history, with an emphasis on photography. My fiction interests are mostly Russian and American literature.
I think visual art, history, literature, politics, religion are all interconnected. They’re what make up culture, and it’s important for artists to learn as much as possible. One of my opinions is that over the years, visual arts in the United States have become somewhat divorced from American culture. Artists complain that no one buys their work, but they don’t want to look in the mirror to see the real root of the problem. Most of the art produced today has zero relevance to the cultural/historical experience and worldview of ordinary people.
DW: How do you define a good photo?
CC: There are so many ways a photograph (or any other work of art) can be “good.” Is it interesting? Is it beautiful? Does it tell a story or teach you something? Does it open your eyes to something you had not noticed before? A good photograph does not need to meet all of those criteria – and probably can’t – but it will meet at least one of them.
DW: What are some of your photographic dreams and aspirations? Is there someplace special you’d like to photograph? Do you prefer people, landscape, or some other type of photography?
CC: I’m not really interested in traveling far away for photography. The work I am doing here has been the work of a lifetime, and will probably not be finished – even if I live to 150.
DW: How has COVID-19 affected your life and photography?
CC: It hasn’t really affected me as much as most people because I have not worked a “real job” in years. If I were still teaching, I’d have quit when COVID started because my immune system has never been strong, and my lungs are already damaged from prior respiratory infections. I can only wear a mask for a few minutes before I begin to feel dizzy. I have a hard time breathing through them. As a result, I don’t go out shopping very often. Fortunately, my 24-year-old son does it for me. Due to COVID, I have curtailed my people photography and concentrated on architectural and landscape work instead.
The biggest thing is that my income has vanished. No one is buying art now, and income from tutorials has died off, too. People have less money to spend right now. Thankfully, my son has a good job, and is able to help.
DW: If there were a bar in Photographer Heaven, whom would you like to drink with?
CC: I’d like to meet Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Walker Evans.
DW: Thank you for making time for this interview. I look forward to seeing your latest photos and forum posts.
CC: You’re welcome.
I hope this interview has inspired you. You can view more of Chris Crawford’s work on his website and on Instagram. Thanks for visiting The Cranky Camera!