Views of Yosemite by George Fiske, ca. 1880-1890

Summary

Creators:

George Fiske

Extent:

1 album (68 photographic prints); 15 x 23 cm. 68 digital objects

Language:

Collection materials are in English

Background

Scope and content:

The Views of Yosemite album contains 68 photographic prints taken by George Fiske, likely in the 1880s. The photographs are mainly of Yosemite Valley in the winter. Views include Black Spring, domes from Columbia Rock, Inspiration Point, El Capitan Bridge, and Grizzly Peak. The album also includes a photograph of a burro-drawn sled bearing an advertisement for Fiske's landscape photography business. Many of the photographs in the album are uncaptioned.

Biographical / historical:

George Fiske was born October 22, 1835, in Amherst, New Hampshire, and raised on the family's farm. In 1858, at the age of 22, he moved west to Sacramento, California, where he worked as a banking clerk for his half-brother Thomas Fiske, of Thomas Fiske & Co. Located in the same building as the bank was the Vance & Weed Photographic Gallery, owned by Robert H. Vance and managed by Charles Leander Weed, the first photographer of Yosemite Valley. In the years following his move to California, it is likely that Fiske received a good amount of photographic training --though where and by whom is not certain --for in 1864 he surfaced as a freelance photographer in San Francisco. In 1868, after a brief hiatus from photography spent farming in the Santa Clara Valley, Fiske returned to San Francisco and became an assistant to Carleton E. Watkins. During the next few years he was employed as a photographer for Thomas Houseworth & Co., and worked with Eadweard Muybridge photographing the Yosemite Valley. In a one-year span between 1872 and 1873, Fiske lost his mother, father and half-brother James, and married his first wife, Elmira ("Myra") F. Morrill. In 1874 Fiske returned to work for Watkins. The following year Watkins went bankrupt, causing another hiatus in Fiske's career. In 1879, after resuming his photographic practice in San Francisco, Fiske moved to the Yosemite Valley, becoming its first year-round resident photographer. While at Yosemite, where he lived for nearly the remainder of his life, Fiske became the close friend of Galen Clark, established a long-running though modest photographic concession of landscape views and custom tourist portraits, and ceaselessly photographed the many features of the Valley and its environs.

In 1884 Fiske began to receive the recognition due his work. Upon viewing Fiske's prints on exhibition at the New Orleans World's Fair, the influential Philadelphia Photographer critic Edward L Wilson described his work as "gems of photographic art" that "place Mr. Fiske in the front rank." That same year, Fiske sent a selection of his photographs to London for the inspection of John Ruskin, who replied, "It is impossible to choose subjects more fitly, or to do better work." Despite this and posthumous praise from the likes of Beaumont Newhall and Ansel Adams, Fiske is yet to be widely recognized as a prominent figure in the history of photography.

In 1896, Myra Fiske died of cancer. The following year George Fiske married Caroline ("Carrie") Paull. In 1904 a fire destroyed Fiske's house and studio, as well as two cameras, two lenses, three quarters of his glass-plate negatives, and a large portion of his stock of prints. (A 1943 fire destroyed the remainder of Fiske's glass-plate negatives.) After the deaths of Galen Clark in 1910 and his wife Carrie in 1917, Fiske become very despondent. In 1918, facing dim business prospects and suffering intensely from a brain tumor, George Fiske committed suicide. He was buried next to Galen Clark in Yosemite's Pioneer Cemetery.

(Sources: Paul Hickman, The Life and Photographic Works of George Fiske, 1835-1918 (M.A. Thesis, Arizona State University, 1979); Paul Hickman and Terence Pitts, George Fiske, Yosemite Photographer (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press; Tucson: University of Arizona, Center for Creative Photography, 1980).)

Acquisition information:

Unknown

Rules or conventions:

Finding Aid prepared using Describing Archives: a Content Standard

Location of this collection:

UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library

University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library

Berkeley, CA 94720-6000, US

Contact:

510-642-6481

bancref-library@berkeley.edu

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