McGraw Colorgraph Company collection

Richard “Dick” McGraw was born in Sioux City, Iowa, 1905. He was the son of industrialist Max McGraw, president of the McGraw-Edison Company in Chicago. He graduated at Grinnell College in 1927, learned photographic portraiture as an apprentice in a studio in Evanston, Illinois from 1931-32. Upon moving to Sierra Madre, California in 1934, he became fascinated with the desert and for many years photographed in the Southwest landscape. From 1939-1953, McGraw was head of the McGraw Colorgraph company, which produced materials for the tricolor carbro process. He retired in 1954, a year after the company was sold to Carnation, and devoted himself entirely to his creative work.

In 1949, Dick McGraw became interested in stereography and in 1951 was accorded the world’s first one-man show in this medium, which took place at the George Eastman House. A book titled The Stereo-Realist Manual, features a chapter written by McGraw and numerous examples of his work. Other photographs by McGraw have been published in various magazines and annuals of photography.

McGraw was close friends with both Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, as well as a student of Adams, and maintained a style of “pure photography.” McGraw writes: “I am not a salon pictorialist, though I went through such a phase many years ago… my pictures are treated more as abstractions than as ‘documentary’ photographs. No portraits. No pretty pictures. No nudes or kittens or puppies.”

According to Adams in the Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, McGraw was a troubled man often in despair of things going wrong, yet was a generous man due to his affluence. McGraw sold part of his land to Ansel and his wife so they could build a house in Carmel and have an “artist community” near Edward Weston. Additionally, towards the end of Edward Weston’s life, McGraw funded the printing of one-thousand negatives that were done by Brett Weston, and the sales were a major financial support for Edward. Dick McGraw died in 1978, from cancer.