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. Since 1879 he has lived and photographed almost forty years in the Yosemite Valley. Much of his photographic work has been lost.

Life

Fiske was born into a peasant family in New England. In young age, he moved to California and settled in San Francisco. He initially trained as a bank clerk before he devoted himself to photography. He made recordings for the company of Thomas Houseworth. He is said to have worked as an assistant to Charles Leander Weed (1824-1903), the photographer who in 1859 made ​​the first known recordings in Yosemite Valley. Also Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916) should have accompanied Fiske when he photographed in the 1860s there.

In 1879, Fiske moved in with his wife in the now designated as a nature reserve by the State of California to Yosemite Valley. In the following decades he lived there all year, even after the conversion into a national park in 1890. Unlike other photographers who specialized in it to take pictures of visitors of the park, Fiske focused on identifying the natural phenomena. He was the first who recorded the region in winter, and its often spectacular photos sold as single images or in albums good, especially in later years. He worked with Galen Clark, who had the oversight of the park. In Clark's book The Yosemite Valley ( 1910), there are a corresponding number of shots that come from Fiske.

A large part of Fiske's negatives were in 1904 in a fire in his living hut which served as a photo lab at the same time, destroyed. Fiske was at this time almost 70 years old. In the rest of his life he tried to reconstruct what was lost by photographed the previous designs again, but in better quality.

Fiske's first wife had died in 1896. He married again and lost his second wife, beginning in 1918. Life's weary, George Fiske took a few months later in his hut in Yosemite National Park 's life, one day before his 83rd birthday.

In the 1920s, Fiske's photographs attracted the attention of Ansel Adams in coming. He made copies of some of the large-format negatives and sat down to ensure that Fiske's photographic work will preserved in reasonable shape, but without success. The photographic plates stored in the sawmill of Yosemite Park Company were destroyed in 1943 when another fire.