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).
“A tall, thin man … friendly but quiet … artistic with a camera … and he loved flowers.”
—Description of Taylor by William T. Elliott (1911-2002), San Diego area photographic business partner
In 1878, Harold A. Taylor was born in Croydon, a growing town in south London. In 1896, he left England and settled in Bakersfield, California.
From 1902-1907, Taylor photographed Yosemite, operating out of his Studio of Three Arrows in Yosemite Valley. Later, living in Southern California, he photographed many of the Spanish Missions built in the late 1700s.
In 1912, Taylor moved to Coronado, where he lived, worked in photography, and established the Coronado Floral Association with his wife Maud. When he started retiring, Harold and Maud moved to El Cajon where they cultivated a half-acre Victorian flower garden on their dear little hill, their “Lomita Querida.” He died in 1960 at the age of 81.
Taylor’s photographic business partner, William T. Elliott, received many of Taylor’s glass plate negatives. William’s son, Robert Lake Elliott, who lived near Yosemite from 1971-2015, is working with Pinyon to preserve, digitize, and explore Taylor’s work.
Artistically documented architecture in various states of restoration; 13 of the 21 California Missions founded in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Additional photographs by Harold Taylor, mostly coastal California.
