Dr. Dain L. Tasker

on a two-toned mount, signed, titled, and dated in pencil on the mount, 1930

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, 2000

William A. Ewing, Flora Photographica: Masterpieces of Flower Photography from 1835 to the Present (London, 1991), pl. 180

Pictorialism in California: Photographs 1900-1940 (J. Paul Getty Museum and the Huntington Library, 1994), pl. 81

Dr. Dain L. Tasker (Howard Greenberg Gallery, 2000), cover (cropped) and unpaginated

Manfred Heiting, et al., At the Still Point: Photographs from the Manfred Heiting Collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Volume II, Part 1 (Los Angeles and Amsterdam, in conjunction with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009), p. 41

This print, on lightly-textured matte-surface paper, is in generally excellent condition. In raking light, a few deposits of original retouching are visible. The mount corners are creased, and the front and the reverse of the mount are very lightly soiled. On the reverse of the mount, '6W30' and 'PF35046JV' are in an unidentified hand in pencil.
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Dr. Dain Tasker, a radiologist at Wilshire Hospital in Los Angeles as well as an amateur photographer, combined his knowledge of science and art to create luminous floral studies.  Initially a photographer of more traditional landscapes and portraits, Tasker changed course after realizing the x-ray’s potential for making art.  By placing a flower directly onto a sheet of film and then exposing it to x-rays, Tasker produced an image which he then used as a negative for finished prints.  Through practice, Tasker perfected this technique to produce photographs that rendered his subjects in subtly-shifting gray tones.

In 1939, Tasker published an article on his work in the U. S. Camera Annual.  He writes:

‘It is strange that we humans will work along certain lines for years before realizing that there are many opportunities for pleasure in our daily grind . . . I never thought of putting a flower on a film as one might x-ray a human hand . . . when we eliminate color and fall back on outline and molded density as the basic beauty factors in our picture, we begin to realize nature’s infinite variety of structural imperfections.’

In 1930, the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles named Tasker’s calla lily photograph one of the hundred best pictures of the year, and the Los Angeles Museum purchased a print for its collection.