George Fiske

George Fiske (born October 22, 1835 in Amherst , New Hampshire , † October 21, 1918 in Yosemite National Park , California ) was an American landscape photographer . From 1879, he lived and photographed in the Yosemite Valley for almost forty years. Much of his photographic work has been lost.

Life

Fiske came from a farming family in New England . At a young age he went to California and settled in San Francisco . There he initially trained as a bank clerk before devoting himself to photography. He made recordings for Thomas Houseworth's company . He is said to have worked as an assistant to Charles Leander Weed (1824-1903), the photographer who made the first known pictures in the Yosemite Valley in 1859. Also Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) Fiske said to have accompanied when he photographed there in the 1860s.

Overhanging Rock, Glacier Point , photo by George Fiske; Pictured is Galen Clark

In 1879, Fiske and his wife moved to the Yosemite Valley, which has now been designated a nature reserve by the State of California. In the following decades he lived there all year round, even after it was converted into a national park in 1890. In contrast to other photographers who specialized in taking pictures of visitors to the park, Fiske concentrated on the natural phenomena there. He was the first to shoot the region in winter, and his often spectacular photos sold well as single images or in albums, especially in later years. He worked with Galen Clark, who oversaw the park. In Clark's book The Yosemite Valley (1910) there are correspondingly many recordings by Fiske.

The majority of Fiskes negatives were destroyed in a fire in 1904 in his hut, which also served as a photo laboratory. Fiske was almost 70 years old at the time. For the rest of his life he tried to reconstruct what was lost by taking photos of the earlier subjects again, but in better quality.

Fiske's first wife had died in 1896. He remarried and lost his second wife in early 1918. Tired of life, George Fiske committed suicide a few months later in his cabin in Yosemite National Park, the day before his 83rd birthday.

In the 1920s, Fiske's photographs drew the attention of Ansel Adams . He made prints from some of the large-format negatives and advocated that Fiske's photographic work be appropriately preserved, but unsuccessfully. The photographic plates stored in the Yosemite Park Company sawmill were destroyed in another fire in 1943.

literature

• Galen Clark: The Yosemite Valley, Its History, Characteristic Features, and Theories Regarding Its Origin. Illustrated from Photographs by George Fiske. NL Salter, Yosemite Valley 1910.
• John Hannavy: Fiske, George (1835-1918). In the S. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Taylor and Francis Group, New York 2008, ISBN 0-41597-235-3 , pp. 532-533.
• Paul Hickman, Terence Pitts: George Fiske, Yosemite Photographer. Northland Press, Flagstaff, Arizona 1980, ISBN 0-87358-194-6 .
• LeRoy Radanovich: George Fiske. Landscape Photographer. In: Ders .: Yosemite Valley. Arcadia, Charleston, South Carolina 2004, ISBN 0-73852-877-3 , pp. 109-116.