[1] He was born around October 4, 1885, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Stanley Clawson and Mary Jones.

[1] His first known feature credits as a cinematographer are for director Lois Weber at Bosworth, Inc., and Universal in 1914–15.

He also worked for the American Film Company and Ince-Triangle-KayBee, where photographic superintendent and future director Irvin Willat would remember Clawson as “sort of like a news cameraman” who was not especially noted for his lighting style.

By the early 1920s, Clawson was chief cinematographer for popular star Anita Stewart at Louis B. Mayer Productions, but later in the decade, he often worked as a second cameraman.

He was lead cinematographer on the early talkie Syncopation, but his few remaining published credits are for expedition films such as Hunting Tigers in India (1929) and low-budget East Coast productions such as The Black King and The Horror (both 1932).