Maurice Crosby was born on 10 July 1926 in Miami, Fla. Upon the death of his father and remarriage of his mother, his family moved first to Newfoundland and then to Nova Scotia, in 1930. Crosby left school in 1942 to join the United States Merchant Marine and during the next several years he participated in the Sicilian campaign and the Murmansk run, and served in the Pacific. He began his career as a photographer by snapping pictures of a convoy in which he was taking part. In 1943 he took the only known photograph available of Winston Churchill during the latter's stopover in Halifax while on the way to the Quebec Conference. The Halifax Herald bought the picture and it was subsequently published in many other newspapers. From 1950-1952 Crosby worked in Halifax as a photographer with Donald Morrison, and from 1952-1957 was a press photographer for the Halifax Herald and the Sydney Post-Record, as well as a commercial photographer in Ottawa. In 1957 he became a free-lance photographer and cameraman with the CBC in Halifax. In 1959 he established his own commercial photography studio as Maurice Crosby Photography Ltd, renamed the Village Photo Shop in 1976. Early in his career one of Crosby's associates had been noted pictorialist photographer Wallace MacAskill. After the latter's death in 1956, Crosby purchased his extensive body of negatives and later organized and selected some of the prints for a catalogue of MacAskill's work. He also sold as souvenirs reprints of the MacAskill's work. In the 1960s he was selected by the Department of Trade & Industry in Ottawa as Nova Scotia's representative to a Boston Gift Show to exhibit his photographs as examples of Nova Scotia's creative output. In the early 1980s Crosby left the studio and became a photographer for the provincial government, retiring in the 1990s.