TASKER DR DAIN L (1872 1964) Daffodils (in box)

Sale 2208 - Lot 62

Unsold

Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000

TASKER, DR. DAIN L. (1872-1964)
"Daffodils" (in box). Silver-bromide contact print (from an X-ray), 11 1/4x9 1/4 inches (28.6x23.5 cm.), on a two-toned mount, with Tasker's signature, title and date, in pencil, on mount recto. 1933

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Additional Details

Originally in the collection of Tasker; acquired from a private dealer in the late 1990s.
The Photograph and the American Dream 1840-1940, 35.

Dain Tasker's ethereal X-ray studies of flowers reveal the plant's fragile structure while simultaneously imbuing their form with compositional weight. Depicted in lustrous grays and dramatic blacks, the daffodils depicted here seem both strangely alive, as though just brushed across the paper by a gust of wind, and like ghostly memorials to their bodily selves. "Daffodils" (in a box) recalls Tasker's affinity with modernism-the organic shapes that compose the flower deftly juxtaposed with a square, dark box in the lower right corner. "Dance of the Daffodils" overtly evokes the photographer's formal allusions to eroticism and the human body, while also seemingly comparing his compositions to lines of music.

Tasker, the chief radiologist at Wilshire Hospital in Los Angeles, used fine-focus X-ray tubes to produce his floral studies on X-ray film. The California photographer Will Connell initially guided him, and his work was published in U.S. Camera (October 1939) and in Popular Photography (March 1942), though only recently returned to the public eye.