Page last updated: October 21, 2022
All glass plate photographs by Harold A. Taylor. Digital images copyright © 2022 by Pinyon Publishing. No reproduction without permission.
Vintage Yosemite (2022): Glass Plate Photographs of Early 20th-Century Yosemite. (6"x9" paperback, 162 pages, ISBN: 978-1-936671-89-2, $35.00).
Historic Artist & Inspiration Points
Today (in the 21st century) when one enters Yosemite National Park from the South Entrance, the first spectacular view of Yosemite Valley is a vista called Tunnel View.
After driving 25 miles through pine and oak forests you pass through the Wawona Tunnel—about four-fifths of a mile blasted through granite, completed in 1933. The road then emerges along the south rim of Yosemite Valley, with views to put tears in your eyes. The panorama includes many of the key features of Yosemite Valley: El Capitan, Clouds Rest, Half Dome, Sentinel Rock, Sentinel Dome, Cathedral Rocks, and Bridalveil Fall.
A hiking trail leading up from Tunnel View takes you to several other awe-inspiring vistas, some of which are named: Artist, Inspiration, Crocker, Stanford, Dewey, Taft.
Harold Taylor took photographs in this area in the early 20th century (before the tunnel). The photographic plates that he labeled as Inspiration Point and Artist Point may not be the exact vistas we know by those names today. While they were undoubtedly taken in the vicinity of what we now know as Tunnel View, what he noted as “Artist Point” looks more like what we know as “Inspiration Point” and vice versa. The collection of vistas in the vicinity of Tunnel View vary in whether certain features are visible or not (e.g., Sentinel Dome, Royal Arches, and North Dome).
Mysteries of the precise location of Artist Point stem as far back as 50 years before Taylors’ photographs to a the first recorded drawing of Yosemite, a pencil drawing made by Thomas Ayres in 1855. The vista in Ayres’ famous Artist Point Drawing doesn’t look precisely like what we know as Artists Point today; but it looks more like what Taylor called Artists Point. So perhaps Taylor and Ayres’ Artist Point might be thought of as the “Historic” or “Original” Artist Point. Similarly, Taylor’s Inspiration point, looks like George Fiske’s late 19th-century photograph of Inspiration point, now called “Old Inspiration Point.”
Inspiration
Artist