About

I'm Matt Cranford, and I live and work in Lincoln, Nebraska. I photograph the Sandhills, the prairie, the cranes coming through in spring, the storms that cross the plains, the capitol, Lincoln and Omaha — and wherever else I happen to be standing when the light does something worth keeping, from Bruges to the salt marsh.

My archive starts in 2006 and hasn't stopped. Most of it was never meant for anyone: thousands of frames of ordinary things, looked at carefully, kept anyway. Some of it found an audience — I shot the alumni calendar, Winter Pivots hung in the 2008 Art of Photography Show, and Red Lightning, Memorial Stadium under a storm exactly as the camera saw it, became the picture people know me by. This site is where the whole archive finally lives in one place, originals intact, nothing overwritten.

Photography reaches further back in my life than my own camera. My third great-grandfather, William Gallagher (1839–1927), sat for a tintype around 1862, and I've spent more than two decades collecting the nineteenth-century photographs that came out of the same plains — Solomon D. Butcher's Nebraska homesteads among them. Macrafly began in 2001 as a home for those pictures; Cranford Rare followed in 2011. In 2014 Military Images ran "Art of War: Fighting Men from the Collection of Matt Cranford," with one of my ambrotypes on the cover, and I still bring the work to the Daguerreian Society's photo fair. Those old photographs taught me what a photograph is for: proof that someone was here, and paid attention.

I'm a scientist by trade. I work in pharmaceutical validation — the discipline of proving that a process does exactly what it says it does, every time. Around that I build things: Cranford Custom Code, a small studio of my own software, and the tools that grew out of it — Stirpi, WarCurve, Validafly. Different subjects, same habit: look closely, record it honestly, keep it.

This is the part I want to last.