About me: Christopher Crawford

I am a young fine art photographer from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I was born here in 1975; and this northeast Indiana city has been my home except for a year and a half spent in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fort Wayne isn’t the sort of place where you’ll find the monumental landscapes or ancient historical sites to which so many photographers gravitate. I considered this, for many years, to be a great damper on my creativity; but, I have found that I simply was not producing work that spoke from my heart. My work from the past few years is a sort of documentation of the people, places, and little details and the thoughts and feelings that have shaped my life. My pieces are small and intimate, rarely larger than 6x9 inches. They are meant to be windows into my world rather than cold, stark graphic images that awe us with their grandeur. Such images are indeed beautiful, but they are often empty and unfeeling. They may express the sense of awe that artist feels about the place, but they do not tell us where he came from or where he is going. My goal is for the viewer to understand the personal connection that I feel to each of my subjects. Northeast Indiana has always been my home, and my fascination with the landscape here has not abated in the nearly six years that I have pursued my work on the abandoned places of Allen county. The Allen County - Fort Wayne area has been such a bountiful source of inspiration that for many years, I did not make a single image outside of Allen County! I have recently begun photographing in Huntington county, although I still have an extensive list of places to photograph at home, and I continue to make new discoveries in my exploration of the area. Although most of my work is fairly traditional, technically speaking, I do work in a variety of photographic media; including Black and White Silver Gelatin Prints, Color Prints, Pinhole Photography, and various types of Polaroid manipulations and transfers.

Five years ago, I made the leap from the darkroom to the digital 'lightroom'. Today, all of my printing is done using digital processes. I still shoot film, primarily black and white, which I process myself. I then scan the negatives with my Nikon Medium format film scanner to bring them into the computer for manipulation and final output. Most of my digital work has, until recently, been very much in the tradition of the straight black and white fine print. I have begun now to experiment with combining images to create totally new worlds from what I find and imagine.

I am a professional artist, with a large number of group and individual exhibitions to my credit. I began exhibiting at the Artlink gallery in Fort Wayne while still a second year student in the Fine Arts Department at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. By the time I graduated with my Bachelor's Degree in 1999, I was already well established as a regular participant in several yearly exhibits in Fort Wayne. Since graduation, I have continued to grow as an artist; refining and expanding my body of work, as well as pursuing exhibition and other professional opportunities.