Floyd Crosby

Floyd Crosby took an unusual road into cinematography. Born in New York to a well-to-do family, he abandoned a career in finance to travel the world as a photographer, drawn to distant places and real life rather than the soundstage. That documentary instinct defined him. He earned early acclaim, and an Academy Award, for his luminous location photography on "Tabu," F. W. Murnau's South Seas drama shot on the islands with natural light and non-professional performers, a film of extraordinary naturalistic beauty.

For years Crosby worked chiefly in documentary and non-fiction film, including notable Depression-era projects about American land and labor, developing a plain, honest visual style far removed from Hollywood gloss. When he did move into feature films, he brought that austerity with him to memorable effect. On "High Noon" he deliberately rejected the soft, pretty look of the standard Western, giving the film harsh, flat, overexposed skies and stark grays, matching the picture's grim, real-time tension. The result was radical for its day and helped make the film a classic.

In the latter part of his career Crosby became an unlikely mainstay of low-budget genre filmmaking, forming a prolific partnership with the producer-director Roger Corman. He shot a string of atmospheric, color-drenched Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, including "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Pit and the Pendulum," wringing rich gothic mood out of tight schedules and modest means, along with beach-party comedies and other drive-in fare. Working cheaply and fast, he never lost the compositional discipline of his documentary years.

Crosby was also the father of the musician David Crosby, and something of his adventurous, independent spirit clearly passed down. He worked into the late 1960s and died in 1985, a cinematographer whose long, varied career bridged ethnographic documentary, a landmark Western, and cult horror, always guided by an unpretentious, truth-seeking eye.