Ralston Crawford

Known primarily as a precisionist painter, Crawford took up photography in 1938 and captured industrial and street scenes with a reductive, geometric perspective that reflected his painting style. A huge fan of New Orleans jazz, Crawford began to chronicle the brass-band funeral processions there in the 1950s. In this self-described effort to document African-American life in New Orleans, Crawford took many exposures of single events, which he characterized as similar to redrawing pencil lines in preparation for an oil painting. Working strictly in serial format, Crawford felt that no single shot could reveal the truth of his subject matter.