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Press, 1992.
Phillips, Christopher, “A Mnemonic Art? Calotype Aesthetics at
Princeton,” October 26 (Fall 1983), 35–62.
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une anthologie, 1816-1871. Paris: Macula, 1989.
Sekula, Allan, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo
Works, 1973–1983. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College
of Art and Design, 1984.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, Photography at the Dock: Essays
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CROMBIE, JOHN NICHOLS (1827–1878)
Scottish photographer
John Nichols Crombie (1827–1878) was a Scot who
came to New Zealand from the gold-fi elds of Victo-
ria, Australia, where he1d worked for a time with the
American fi rm of Meade Bros. During his initial stay in
Auckland (1854 to 1856) he claimed he1d made over a
thousand portraits, with a further 450 in Nelson and the
Southern Provinces. After this tour he traveled back to
Australia where he acquired the skills of an ambrotype
artist and collodion photographer. One of Crombie1s
endearing qualities was his constant ability to gain the
attention in the newspapers with reports of his pho-
tographic activities. This echoed his rise to fame and
fortune. With the money he made from photography, he
invested wisely in property and gold mining shares. On
September 4th, 1862 he returned to Scotland where he
gave a talk to the Glasgow Photographic Association at
the commencement of their 1862–1863 season. A report
of this was published in the British Journal of Photog-
raphy in 1863. It is one of the fi rst reports of its kind
which identifi es some of the problems encountered by
those who went to New Zealand with a camera. Crombie
returned to New Zealand and expanded his business in-
terests. When he and his wife fi nally departed for good
in 1872, they entertained their friends on a grand scale
by giving a ball. He died in Melbourne.
William Main
CROOKES, SIR WILLIAM (1832–1919)
English scientist, photographer, and editor
Crookes was born in London in 1832 as the eldest of
sixteen children of a tailor. As the son of a man of com-
paratively modest means, Crookes received irregular
schooling until studying chemistry at the Royal College
of Chemistry from 1848 until 1854. Displaying an early
interest in photography, Crookes used it as a research
tool. In 1852, he tried to photograph the colored rings
shown by certain crystals between tourmaline plates in
polarized light. He obtained the photographs by using
either calcspar or nitro, but also traced certain abnormal
fi gures due to rays beyond the visible spectrum that had
never been seen by the naked eye. Crookes joined with
another chemist, John Spiller in May 1854 in penning
an article for the Philosophical Magazine that discussed
the use of glycerin as a means of prolonging the moist
and sensitive state of collodion fi lm.
A physical chemist, Crookes suffered from taking a
nontraditional route to the profession as most top sci-
entists came from universities. Lacking superior quali-
fi cations, he scrambled to make a living. In May 1854,
he was appointed superintendent of the meteorological
department of the Radcliffe Observatory at Oxford. The
position proved to be a short one, lasting only one year
but Crookes again applied photography to his work.
He made meteorological records at the observatory
using the wax-paper process. In 1856 he took some
photographs through a telescope of the moon that were
one and one-fourth in diameter. His moon photographs
were exhibited at the Crystal Palace. The photographs
included great detail and Crookes obtained a grant from
the Royal Society to enlarge them by twenty diameters,
a scale that could not have been achieved if he had
employed the gelatin process rather than the wax-paper
one. He received an additional grant from the British
government to defray the cost of experiments for fi nding
a portable means of illuminating objects in dark places
suffi ciently to enable them to be photographed. In 1857,
he produced a 60-page Handbook to the Waxed-Paper
Process in Photography.
In 1856, Crookes moved to London, where he set up
an analytical laboratory in his home and began to edit a
number of scientifi c journals, including Chemical News.
A patient and careful man who quickly earned renown
for experimental ability, Crookes aimed to prove that
pure scientifi c research could lead to fi nancial rewards.
Among his achievements are the Crookes Tube, a pre-
decessor of the cathode-ray tube used in television sets;
the spinthariscope, which registers radioactive decay as
fl ashes on a phosphor screen; and the radiometer, which
shows radiant energy.
In his London home, Crookes devoted his energies
to the development of photography and edited the Liv-
erpool Photographic Journal from November 1856 until
March 1857. In March 1857 he also began to edit the
Journal of the London Photographic Society and served
as that organization’s secretary. In 1857, after reading
a paper entitled “The Albumen Process on Collodion,”