Adelaide Photographic Company

Frazer Smith Crawford (c. 1829 – 30 October 1890) was a photographer in the colony of South Australia, founding manager of the Adelaide Photographic Company, then photolithographer for the South Australian government. In a seemingly unrelated sphere, Crawford came to be recognised as an authority on agricultural pests and diseases, particularly known for identifying and exploiting naturally occurring predators of plant pests.

Crawford was born in Scotland and emigrated, perhaps via Hobart, Tasmania, to Melbourne, Victoria sometime before 1859 and founded a business at 83 Swanston Street which provided a photographic printing service.

Crawford was a resident of Melbourne until mid-1861, then Sydney for a year or two, before moving to Adelaide, where he had been appointed manager of Adelaide Photographic Company studio in King William Street, a little north of Hindley Street. He brought to Adelaide two notable employees: E. Wake Cook and John A. Upton, both later acclaimed as artists. He served that company, which was for a time the chief competitor to Townsend Duryea, from 1864 to 1866, when, at the suggestion of Henry Strangways, he was appointed photolithographer to the South Australian Government's Survey and Crown Lands Department.

The purpose of Crawford's appointment was to facilitate the reduction and reproduction of plans prepared by the Surveyor-General's office. Previously this work was done by hand, which was slow, expensive and error-prone. By photolithography plans or documents could be speedily reproduced at any desired (usually one-half or one-third) scale. Crawford was first sent to study the Lands Office in Victoria, where John Walter Osborne, the pioneer of photolithography, had revolutionised the preparation and promulgation of plans. He also made a careful study of published accounts of the working of the Ordnance Survey Department in London, with the result that the Section he established was a model of efficiency and productivity. Despite his later fame and quasi-official status as an expert on pests, he remained primarily a photolithographer until his death.

He was chairman of the photographic awards jury at the 1887 Jubilee Exhibition.

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