Dain Tasker (1872-1964) was born in Beloit, Wisconsin. He was the chief radiologist at Wilshire Hospital in Los Angeles when radiology was in its beginning stages. In the 1920’s Tasker became involved with pictorial photography, creating photographs based on genres such as landscape and portraiture. In the 1930’s, inspired by an x-ray photograph made by a fellow physician he began applying his knowledge of the x-ray image process to recording flowers. 


Sublime in their minimalist sensibility, Tasker’s images of flowers are fragile, ghost-like representations of this frequently photographed subject. His work was championed by Will Connell, a prominent Los Angeles photographer and educator who promoted his work and urged him to exhibit his prints in the salons of the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles and at the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco. Tasker’s x-ray photographs were also published in U.S. Camera and Popular Photography in that era.