Despite his range of subjects, it was flowers that were perhaps closest to Taylor’s heart. While he photographed flowers embedded in California’s lush outdoors — growing wild in fields and scrub, planted in flowerbeds, dressing orderly Victorian gardens — his most striking images are of cut flowers moved indoors for studio treatment. Having developed an early colorization method, Taylor was among the first generation of photographers to experiment with full-color autochromes, a technology well-employed in his floral work, which often takes the form of projectable lantern slides. Braced against dark backgrounds, his botanicals are distinctly dramatic: tenderly lit, but with the gravity of a formal, seated portrait. They are painterly, nostalgic, somehow solemn. As Grace Linden writes, “the hues of autochromes always feel more real than reality”. This is especially true in Taylor’s work, which highlights indigo and vermilion intensities more vivid than anywhere in nature.
