Professional Commercial Photography Service

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The journey to the absolute height of one's
life-affirming passion is often paved with the
most humble of beginnings, and in the case of the
journey of photographer Eric Crossan, the journey
that led him to photograph a President of the
United States began with a discarded negative
contact printer, left for the junk man.
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When he was in junior high school, the
13-year-old happened to see a neighbor from the
bedroom window of his Newark home. "He was
getting ready to discard this old negative
contact printer," Crossan said recently in his
Townsend studio. "Instead of letting it sit in
the trash, I asked him if it was OK for me to
play around with it. My father helped me set it
up in the bathroom, and gave me some old
negatives to use. That was really all I needed. I
was on my way from there."
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There is no better way to take in the more than
40 years Crossan has devoted to his work than to
listen to it all unravel, experience by
experience, like sitting down with a catalog of
photos of a family, for instance, and admiring
the changing faces. Yes, the photographs on the
studio walls serve as a gentle reminder of what
has made Crossan one of the most prominent
photographers in Delaware, with more than 800
magazine covers to his name and assignments that
have taken him around the world. But it's the
stories that tell everything. The White House.
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and George H. W.
Bush. The Queen of Sweden. The famous and the
obscure.  
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But before all of that, there was the rescued
negative contact printer, a project he discarded
by the time he was 14, when he went to work for
the Newark Weekly Post, where he made 3 for
every published photo. As a high-school senior,
at a time when his classmates were attending
dances and parties, Crossan was working for the
Delaware bureau of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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For ten years, Crossan photographed the Common
Wealth Awards at the Hotel duPont in Wilmington,
given annually in honor of achievement in the
dramatic arts, literature, science and invention,
mass communication, public service, and
government and sociology.  
Each year, celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Ted
Turner, Larry King and Henry Kissinger would
parade by Crossan as he worked. The hotel
continued to serve as a good luck charm for
stories at a fundraiser there in 2006, Crossan
found himself for a brief moment at the
conclusion of a reception line that was dotted
with dignitaries. He looked up from his camera.
In front of him stood George H.W. Bush, the 42nd
President of the United States, standing alone,
about to join the contingent.
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For the last 40 years, Crossan has had what he
believes is the greatest job in the world -- the
gift to tell the stories of people and places and
events. They're there on the coffee table in his
Townsend studio, the rich catalog of his
experience behind the lens. He no longer devotes
his energies to climbing to the very top of the
Delaware Memorial Bridge, but his passion for the
craft of his profession has not wavered.
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Lately, he's been taking a lot of family and
individual portraits, as well as aerial shots of
homes and farms taken from a helicopter.  
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