1931 Dain Tasker "X-ray of a Lily" Photo
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GUEST:
It's been in my family. My great-aunt owned it, and she lived in Palm Springs-L.A. area. What I've been told about it is that her daughter was ill and in the hospital, and that her doctor gave her this photograph as a gift. And then I was at a floral shop and I saw the image on a greeting card. So I bought the greeting card, took it home, and looked at the back of the greeting card, and it mentioned a gallery. On the internet, I found a book that was pictures from the showing that was at the gallery, and this photograph was in the book.
APPRAISER:
And it's actually on the cover of the book.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
The name of the photographer is Dain Tasker. He was a physician, a radiologist, at the Wilshire Hospital in Los Angeles.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
He became interested in photography in the 1920s. And so here he is in his day job, using X-rays, and he has a kind of ah-hah moment, that "I'm going to look at flowers as the subject matter of my pictures." He'd already been photographing for about ten years. The X-ray becomes his art form. Apparently, Dr. Tasker enjoyed gifting his photographs to nurses, to patients, to other physicians.
GUEST:
Mm.
APPRAISER:
And then he met a photographer in L.A. whose name was Will Connell. And Will Connell was 25 years younger than Tasker, a very prominent fine art photographer, and he encourages the doctor to look at his work more seriously. And he crosses over from being an amateur photographer to a professional. At auction today, a preliminary estimate would be $6,000 to $9,000.
GUEST:
Oh, wow, that's great.
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