Hugh Crawford Books is the brainchild of photographer Hugh Crawford, who has facilitated and overseen an explosion of interest in Jamie Livingston and his work. After Livingston’s death, Crawford created a private website as a tribute to his friend. Within days of its soft launch in 2008, it was accidentally discovered by Chris Higgins of Mental Floss, who shared the link with his large following and the site went viral.
An artist in his own right, Hugh Crawford grew up on a walnut farm in the Central Valley of California. In 1978, he graduated from Bard College, where he studied photography and became friends with Jamie Livingston. After graduation, Crawford worked as a freelance photographer for Columbia Records and Rolling Stone. In his spare time, he photographed the famous nightclubs of that era including CBGB’s, the Mudd Club, Danceteria and Studio 54, and was hired as the in-house photographer at Fiorucci and Xenon. In 1984, Crawford received his MFA from CalArts where he studied Post-Studio art with John Baldessari. After graduate school Crawford exhibited his large scale black and white portraiture in galleries in New York City and San Francisco. He also became a developer for Amiga Computers and created a mural printing software called HugePrint. Later, after getting married and having two children, he became a software architect at numerous computer startups and an engineer at Cisco Systems. A few years after Livingston’s death, Crawford spent six months re-photographing and digitizing all 6,754 Polaroids (with his friend Betsy Reid) which led to an exhibit of Livingston’s Polaroids at Bard College in October 2007 and the website that accompanied it.
Because of the site’s popularity, many prestigious publishers expressed interest in the project but because of the huge number of photographs, few were willing to publish the work in its entirety. Crawford strongly believed that the Polaroids belonged together because of the importance of the work’s chronology and decided to become a publisher. A Kickstarter campaign helped pay for his efforts.
Upcoming titles from Hugh Crawford Books include: What a Fabulous Party: New York City 1978-1982 and How to Be Interesting: Advice, How To, and Miscellaneous by Hugh Crawford.