The Australian Women's Register

Jill Crossley is known equally for her commercial and artistic photography.

She grew up on her parent’s sheep station at Katanning in Western Australia 277 km south-east of Perth. Her father was known to take photographs of his stud sheep and to process the photographic prints using Pyrex dishes and a washbasin. Jill and her brother Michael would watch on – their intrigue so great that they used their savings to buy a camera when Jill was only nine years old. Brother and sister consequently learnt how to develop films and print photographs using improvised equipment, just like their father.

Jill remained at home after finishing her schooling so she could pursue her interest in photography. She used a 116 folding camera and a cheap enlarger, setting up a darkroom in the bathroom using dishes made of wood which were painted with bitumen that sat on planks of wood placed over the bath tub. The first public showing of her work occurred when she submitted her photographs for display at the local agricultural show.

Crossley set her mind on becoming a portrait photographer and received some training in negative retouching from Mattie Hodgson. This led to her obtaining work with the photographer Susan Watkins in Perth in the period 1949-1950. She also worked in the studios of Allan Gough and John Dent. This experience made her realise that with her shy disposition she was not ideally suited to portrait photography.

Crossley moved to Sydney in 1954 intent on becoming an occupational therapist but before long she went back to photography. From 1957 to 1958 she worked as an assistant to Max Dupain in his Sydney studio and she was later to remark that his aesthetics and high standards were an inspiration to her.

1959 saw her becoming a freelance photographer working in a mainly commercial capacity. For a while she worked for the ABC taking still photographs for their productions and photographs for the advertising industry; however she continued to make portraits of children and to produce photographs that were used for book illustrations or were published in magazines such as Art in Australia . Then throughout the 1970s and 1980s she collaborated with the Craft Council of Australia, producing a number of instructional resource kits relating to weaving, woodcraft and leatherwork.

In the 1970s she also accepted an assignment in Papua New Guinea, which saw her travelling to New Britain and New Ireland; she accompanied an Australian archaeological team to Pompeii, Italy taking photographs of excavated artefacts.

Jill Crossley went onto have a number of solo exhibitions, starting in the 1980s at the Australian Centre for Photography (1980), and the David Reid Gallery in Paddington (1981). On the latter, Max Dupain commented ‘[i]t would be safe to say that this little exhibition of photographs is one of the most consequential of its kind we have witnessed for some time.’ She also exhibited at the Studio Gallery in Brisbane (1982).

Well into her eighties Jill Crossley continues to photograph and exhibit her work, with her exhibition at the Kerrie Lowe Gallery drawing praise from the art critic Robert McFarlane, who described her as ‘a tenacious, talented, photographer.’

In 2013 her exhibition Beyond Looking opened at the Arthere gallery. This was followed by her Unreliable Witness exhibition, held at the Stanley Street gallery in Darlinghurst, NSW, 2015, and consisted of studies of the natural world, plants, the water, the style being an interplay of realism and abstraction.

Technical

Her early camera was a 116 folding camera, in 1959 she used a Mamiyaflex and a Fujica camera. In recent years she has worked with a small digital camera with a zoom lens.

Collections

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Edmund and Joanna Capon Research Library and Archive

Deakin University

Powerhouse Museum

State Library of Queensland

University of Western Sydney

State Library of Victoria