The first photo Richard Crawley ever took was a family portrait, when he was only a boy: a blurry black-and-white picture of his parents and siblings, frozen in time. It’s the kind of forgettable photo others might throw out, but for Crawley, now 71, it was the beginning of the rest of his life.
Over the following decades, he captured about 400 hours of footage of everything that made up his life in Victoria, Australia – house moves, holidays, school pickups, pets, renovations. His main subjects were his wife Carol (who “tolerated” the filming) and his son James. Sometimes his inspirations were odd. “There’s the cutlery!” he proclaims, yanking open the drawer, in a moment of surviving footage. Or: “I’m just going to video these tomatoes,” he says seriously, zooming in on a very ordinary basket of tomatoes. He captured baby James eating an orange for a whole hour. Whatever his reason, he never did anything with the film.
