Early New Zealand Photographers: Fiske, George

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George Fiske

American landscape photographer.

born 22 October 1835 – died 21 October 1918

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 previous George Fiske next 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, previous George Fiske next committed suicide. He was buried next to Galen Clark in Yosemite's Pioneer Cemetery.

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

The Online Archive of California

George Fiske, Landscape Photographer banner image [above] from Photographs of Yosemite Valley and Big Trees of Mariposa County, Calif., 1884, California, by George Fiske. Purchased 1991. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Te Papa (AL.000079)