Today, the Coronado Flower Show, hosted each spring in the small San Diego Bay resort town for which it is named, is the largest tented flower show in the United States. But when it began in 1922, the display was little more than a few shaded tables of wildflower arrangements; the pet project of the photographer Harold A. Taylor (1878–1960), who had arrived in California from England in 1896, at the age of eighteen.

A true working photographer, Taylor documented Yosemite National Park (developing in an onsite darkroom), historical Spanish missions up and down the Pacific coast, and took some of the earliest aerial photographs (many destroyed by a studio leak). As the Hotel del Coronado’s resident photographer, he captured visiting dignitaries; more informally, he immortalized sports teams for the local high school yearbook. His images illustrate volumes of poetry, a 1920 historical romance, and the 1916 “pictorial survey” of the San Diego Exposition. “No man has done more to exploit the attractions of southern California or to spread a more general knowledge of the beauty of its scenery”, wrote San Diego chronicler Samuel T. Black in 1913.

Despite his range of subjects, it was flowers that were perhaps closest to Taylor’s heart. While he photographed flowers embedded in California's lush outdoors — growing wild in fields and scrub, planted in flowerbeds, dressing orderly Victorian gardens — his most striking images are of cut flowers moved indoors for studio treatment. Having developed an early colorization method, Taylor was among the first generation of photographers to experiment with full-color autochromes, a technology well-employed in his floral work, which often takes the form of projectable lantern slides. Braced against dark backgrounds, his botanicals are distinctly dramatic: tenderly lit, but with the gravity of a formal, seated portrait. They are painterly, nostalgic, somehow solemn. As Grace Linden writes, “the hues of autochromes always feel more real than reality”. This is especially true in Taylor’s work, which highlights indigo and vermilion intensities more vivid than anywhere in nature.

Having also founded the Coronado Floral Association with his wife Maud, Taylor reached for the same impulse in his photography as is embodied in his now century-old flower show: a conviction that flowers deserve the same serious attention as any portrait or landscape.