Harold A. Taylor (1878–1960) arrived in California from England in 1896, at eighteen, and became one of southern California’s most tireless visual boosters. This Public Domain Review collection (text by Thea Applebaum Licht) gathers his autochromes of flowers — the subject closest to his heart, shot with the seriousness most photographers reserved for people.
Taylor was among the first generation to work with full-color autochromes, and his floral studies were often made as projectable lantern slides:
- He documented Yosemite (developing in an onsite darkroom), the Spanish missions, and some of the earliest aerial photographs — those destroyed by a studio leak
- As resident photographer of the Hotel del Coronado he shot visiting dignitaries; his images illustrated poetry volumes and a 1920 historical romance
- In 1913 San Diego chronicler Samuel T. Black wrote that “no man has done more to exploit the attractions of southern California”
- He founded the Coronado Flower Show in 1922 with his wife Maud (via the Coronado Floral Association) — now the largest tented flower show in the United States
His studio autochromes of cut flowers are braced against dark backgrounds, “tenderly lit, but with the gravity of a formal, seated portrait” — with indigo and vermilion intensities, as PDR writer Grace Linden puts it, more vivid than anywhere in nature.
The collection’s quiet thesis: Taylor’s photography and his now century-old flower show spring from the same conviction — that flowers deserve the same serious attention as any portrait or landscape.