Crawford Barton – Photographer
Barton’s camera followed the Castro district at the moment it became the center of gay San Francisco. His 1973 portrait of Harvey Milk, taken on Castro Street and now held in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, is among the best-known images of the era, and his 1977 photograph “Castro Street Scene, Two Couples” has appeared in documentaries such as Gay USA, The Butch Factor and We Were Here. Jack Fritscher’s interview with him, “San Francisco Photographer of Beautiful Men,” was recorded on October 2, 1990, and collected in Inventing the Gay Gaze. It preserves Barton’s own account of his work three years before his death. His books, Beautiful Men in 1976 and the posthumous Days of Hope, edited by Mark Thompson, remain a visual record of gay life in the years he documented, and they sit alongside Fritscher’s other profiles of photographers on this site.