The Journeys of Harry Crosby (Cinewest, PBS, c. 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 17) at 10 I watched an intriguing hour-long special on PBS called The Journeys of Harry Crosby. The “Harry Crosby” in question was not singer Bing Crosby (whose official name at birth was Harry Lillis Crosby) or the crazy 1920’s poet who committed joint suicide with his girlfriend ini Paris in 1929, but a photographer who was based in San Diego and became famous for photographing Baja California. Harry W. Crosby was born in 1928 in Seattle, Washington (not far from Bing Crosby's birthplace in Spokane), but his parents moved to the ritzy San Diego suburb of La Jonna in 1935, when Harry was 7, and he grew up here and lived here for the rest of his life. In fact, he’s still very much alive at 94, and though imdb.com doesn’t give a production date for this documentary,the publicity mentioned Harry Crosby as being 92, which would date it at 2021 or 2022. For the first 12 years of his adult career Crosby was a high-school teacher, specializing in science, and in his later years he would organize field trips with his students to take pictures of natural subjects. (One wonders what difficulties a teacher who tried to do that now would face from the students’ parents, especially in this more darkly suspicious age. “You want to take my kid out to the middle of Baja California so you can molest him?” more than one parent would probably say today.)

In 1964 Crosby decided to give up teaching and concentrate on photography for the rest of his career – though one of his grandsons interviewed for this film describes him as a modern-day Renaissance man since he also designed and built his own cameras and his own cars, bred orchids and pursued a number of other arcane interests. He got an assignment to shoot pictures of Baja California for a magazine in 1964, and three years later he ran into Robert Finch, then Ronald Reagan’s lieutenant governor, at an American football game in Los Angeles. Finch hired Crosby to shoot photos of Baja for a bicentennial book honoring both Californias – how nice to be reminded of a time when a Republican politician in high elective office treated California’s Mexican history with respect and didn’t write off all Mexicans as pond scum! Crosby decided for this commission to reproduce the expedition Spanish conquistador Gaspar de Portolá led in 1769-1770, following Native American trails up the California coast and establishing a chain of missions along the way. At first Crosby and company traveled the route in a dune buggy Crosby had designed and built, but the combination of dirt roads and an open car proved too destructive to the delicate photographic equipment. Instead Crosby and his crew decided to abandon the dune buggy and continue the trip the way Portolá had – riding mules. Crosby and company designed special saddlebags that would allow him to retrieve his cameras quickly if he saw anything he wanted to photograph.

On a later expedition to Baja, he discovered a set of giant cave paintings that are one of the five principal surviving centers of paleolithic art, which the United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) subsequently declared a world historic site. Crosby was ultimately commissioned to write a book of his own, illustrated with his photographs, on the history of California under Mexican rule. He had never written for publication before but he took to the task readily, producing books with titles like Last of the Californios and Antigua California. He was also in a long-term marriage that produced three children,.though his wife understandably resented his long absences of two to three months at a time while he went on photographic trips. Mrs. Crosby more or less resigned herself to it, saying in the documentary, “Someone had to stay behind to look after the kids.” They had three, including a son named Robbin who was a founding member of the heavy-metal band Ratt until he was fired in 1992 for drug addiction; he announced he was HIV-positive in 2001 and died of a heroin overdose in 2002. (Harry wasn’t the only legendary photographer named Crosby who had a son that became a rock star with drug issues. The great cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who won an Academy Award for shooting Friedrich Murnau’s last film, Tabu, in 1931 was the father of David Crosby of The Byrds and Crosby, stills, Nash and Young, though David ultimately recovered from his various addictions and died only recently in January 2023 at age 81.)

Harry Crosby’s greatest sources of pride were having documented the rachero and vaquero lifestyles of Baja California before theiy disappeared completely – he went back to Baja 20 years or so after publishing Last of the Californios, and found that most of the rahnches where he had taken pictures had since been abandoned by the owners or their heirs) and having discovered the stunning cave paintings, which were distinguished from other surviving cave paintings mostly by their sheer size. The Baja paintings were up to 40 feet tall and Crosby theorized the artists must have had rope ladders or other tools like that to get that high. The popular superstition in Baja at the time the paintings were discovered was that they had been painted by giants, but Crosby pointed to the handprints on the paintings, left there as a sort of artists’ signature, that indicated they were normal-sized humans., The Journeys of Harry Crosby was a fascinating documentary that introduced me to someone I’d never heard of before, though it did get annoying when people were being interviewed in Spanish and the subtitles were white-on-white and therefore virtually illegible, especially to my rapidly aging eyes.