X-ray beauty

Throughout the 1930s Dr. Dain L. Tasker, a radiologist, used fine-focus X-ray tubes to produce floral studies on X-ray film. 

Published in "U. S. Camera" and "Popular Photography" magazines, and tutored by the photographer Will Connell, Tasker''s work was hailed for its beauty.

Dr. Tasker was the chief radiologist at Wilshire Hospital in Los Angeles when radiology was in its formative phase. In the late 1920’s inspired by his knowledge of the x-ray image process, and through his developing involvement with Pictorial photography, Dr. Tasker began to record numerous varieties of flowers with the x-ray process.

His results are among the most striking and unique floral images in the history of photography, delicate in their rendering of subtle tones and descriptive in the tracing of the flower’s fragile structure; fulfilling with out sentimentality, Tasker’s statement, “Flowers are the expression of the love life of plants”.

Tasker’s floral x-ray photographs, created in the 1930’s are timeless representations of their subject drawn by a distinct process that marries science and art, situating themselves as forerunners within certain experimental modes of contemporary photographic practice. 

Dr. Tasker’s modest, yet fully realized radiographs of flowers include a range of species and a wealth of structural beauty that is both inherent to their subject and an effect of the artist’s arrangement within the rectangular field that holds their form.