Anita L. Crane: Creating her own path to fine art photography

Anita Crane showing her international magazine covers. Photo: Photo: Kirsten Kohlwey

PARK CITY, Utah — Anita Crane moved to Park City long enough ago to pursue seven careers. She is driven, entrepreneurial and talented. Her artwork has been highlighted on the covers of magazines in different genres. She won the Director’s Choice Best Music Video award for “Bandida,” performed by Carol Markstrom in 2020 at the Wild Bunch Film Festival, and her video is currently in a group nominated for Best Music Video at an international festival in the Netherlands. What she is striving for now is to combine her skills to create unique fine art photography.  

At this point, Crane has lived in Park City longer than anywhere else. She moved here with her husband, Bruce, who died six years ago. She is a true Park City local with four children and over 25 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  

In the early days, she sewed lace-trimmed wedding dresses and bears with custom outfits. She wrote eleven craft books, some landing on Crafter’s Choice’s bestseller list. As a writer, Crane has also written children’s books and taught writing and illustrating. Her first two endeavors both resulted in her art being featured on the covers of magazines Victoria and Teddy Bear. Now, her photography graces magazine covers. 

Crane paints or photographs backgrounds and combines them with unique portraits of people to portray them in a very personal story. Some of her fine art photographs look like movie posters, except they feature her clients. Her creativity seems to have no bounds. Crane has a signature feature in all her paintings. For Thomas Kinkade it was Tinkerbell. For Anita Crane, it is an owl. She incorporates an owl somewhere in the picture, and it is not necessarily hidden. Crane says, “Really, my goal is to create fantasy art for children and families that could be hung on the wall, and it could be part of their decoration.”

For the past 30 years, she has focused on photography, which Salt Lake City Magazine has featured. She is particularly proud of her photographs of the horse whisperer Buck Brannaman, which they published, choosing hers out of a large field of competitors. Her portraits have won awards in international competitions, including a silver award from Portrait Masters.  

She morphs from one pursuit into the next while taking the highlights on her next journey. Crane has that entrepreneurial spirit. The teddy bears transitioned from 3D stuffed animals into 2D drawn and painted illustrations for her books. She opened the Bearlace Cottage store upstairs at 311 Main Street, where she sold her bears, dresses, and dishes from the East Coast. She took along the remaining dishes and cabinets when she closed the store. Now, they are props for her portrait photography. You can see the Bearlace Cottage sign on the porch of her house.  

Crane is a big believer in continuing education and has never stopped learning and improving her craft. She is enrolled in an online course with a portrait master in Australia. Even though she has been selling her photography for 20 years now, she keeps challenging herself. Crane is now combining her photography with encaustic processes involving hot wax and other paintings she creates. You can see her work at photographybyneets.com. Whether you are looking for headshots and branding or the ultimate portrait experience, Crane can provide you with that experience.  

In November, she headed to New Mexico to do photoshoots of Western Music artists she has photographed for years. Her photography is used in music videos, on CD and album covers and in marketing materials. She loves working with artists like Mary Kaye Holt who have a very distinct style, but Crane has plenty of ideas of her own. She interviews her clients to find out what images they are looking for and brings props to help them achieve their goals. At the conference, she takes about 300 photos of each client and then culls them down to about 30.  

She loves what she does and always strives to compete with the best. She also uses the best materials to have her images printed, sending her images to Graphistudio in Italy. Crane will work with her subjects until the image is perfect. 

Crane customizes her photo shoots to fit the personality of her subject. For one of them, she went to the Osguthorpe Farm and put up a clothesline, upon which she hung a series of country-style dresses to create the appropriate backdrop. Her house is full of one-of-a-kind props.  

In addition to her portrait photography business, she is currently working on illustrating a book of Western Poetry written by A. K. Moss. Crane has been illustrating books, mostly children’s books with watercolor paintings, but the current project combines her photography and illustration skills using Adobe Photoshop.  

Her home represents Anita Crane perfectly. It is one of Park City’s original houses, with the 2022 and 2023 Park City Museum preservation awards on display. As Park City has grown, Crane has embraced new technologies like Nextdoor to reach out to her neighbors. She discovered that Park City had remained a neighborly community when she recently suffered an injury. People reached out to help her that she hadn’t even met before. 

In the last few years, she not only took photographs of singers but also started to sing and compose songs herself. You may have seen her singing at a Christmas show at the Egyptian Theater. Anita Crane embodies the spirit of exploration and creation that has let Park City reinvent itself over the decades.