You probably don’t know his name, but you've almost certainly seen his work many times.
One of the world’s first nature photographers was a New Brunswicker named George Thomas Taylor. He built his own camera from scratch and roamed the province taking outdoor photos at a time when that was almost unheard of. Early photography required an entire portable darkroom and a whole lot of patience.
At the time, almost all photography took place in stuffy studios that reeked of chemicals. Subjects were posed with unread books and broken columns, staring grimly into the distance. George Taylor also did this kind of work, too— he had to, to pay the bills.
But his real passion was heading into the wilderness with his camera. He became one of Canada’s — and possibly the world’s — first outdoor photographers.
George Taylor was born in Fredericton in 1838, just one year before the camera was invented. His father was a carpenter who had built the family’s house at 262 Northumberland Street.
In his teens in the 1850s, he began following in his father's footsteps to be a carpenter.
In the 1850s, teenage George began learning the carpentry trade himself. But he also had a creative streak. In his free time, he painted — a hobby popular among the wives of British officers stationed in Fredericton. One of them, the prominent British artist Margaret Deborah Cookesley, took him under her wing and taught him to paint.
British officers stationed in town also gave him some of the latest publications on photography from back home, sparking a fascination that would shape the rest of his life. These put him more on the cutting edge of the rapidly expanding world of photography.
At age 18, George began apprenticing under a travelling photographer named David Laurence. Studio photography at the time involved enormous cameras, strong-smelling chemicals, and a lot of waiting around for the right light.
As one 1871 issue of The Photographic Times put it: “the poor plodding photographer is chronically in a ‘sick’ or a ‘fog’.”
Taking a picture was hard work and required specific lighting, and a lack of movement – it was much different than snapping a picture with your phone.
The photographer had to build their own negatives out of large glass plates filled with precise measurements of frequently toxic chemicals, which they would mix up in a brew. The glass plates had to be wet and needed to stay wet or would be ruined, meaning they had to rush to take the photo before the glass plate dried out.
Despite these severely limiting factors owing to the technology of the times, Taylor wanted to combine his love of painting outdoor landscapes with his photography. He wanted to take photography out of the studio and into the wilderness.
Taylor and his father, the carpenter, developed an entirely new custom camera from scratch, as well as ways of transporting the delicate glass plate negatives and the toxic chemical “brew” in a way that was portable.
“Portable” is, of course, relative. George Taylor’s camera still required an entire actual dark room, which also had to be brought with him.
When he ventured into the wilderness of remote New Brunswick on long photography expeditions, he required an entire canoe to transport his new homemade “portable” camera.
At the time, travel around the province was difficult. Most people didn’t go far, and outdoor photography was nearly unheard of. In fact, there were probably fewer than ten outdoor photographs of New Brunswick taken before the 1850s.
Then George Taylor came along and, over the years, took thousands of photographs of New Brunswick and its people all the way from Edmundston to Saint John, venturing into the difficult-to-access interior and the newly settled areas.
The conditions to take a picture needed to essentially be perfect. George Taylor and his team of guides would often be set up and wait for days for an opportunity to take a single photograph.
Guides were required to make the trips into New Brunswick’s wild interior, and these guides were frequently Indigenous peoples who offered their traditional skills to white people for money.
Throughout his lengthy career, George Taylor almost always used the same group of guides for his expeditions, who were from St. Mary’s and Tobique. Taylor seems to have developed a long-standing and respectful relationship with them — his diaries show he tried to learn their language, spent time with their families, and welcomed their advice on where and what to photograph. The guides, in turn, learned about photography and helped him by suggesting places and subjects he could shoot.
George Taylor also photographed his guides and the Indigenous peoples of New Brunswick, this work forming an important and exceptionally rare historical record of that time, one that is often missing from the history book.
George Taylor made his final nature photography expedition up the Tobique in 1906, when he was 68 years old. After that, he quietly and somewhat inexplicably seemed to have given up photography and returned to his youthful passion of painting.
(While it's not entirely clear why exactly he hung up the camera, it likely had more to do with tastes changing with the times than anything especially dramatic.)
Just seven years later, a new kind of camera made photography much simpler — and outdoor photography became a hobby almost anyone could take up.
George Taylor, the pioneer, was forgotten.
But his photographs survived.
You may not know it, but you are almost certainly very familiar with George Taylor’s work. It is remarkably ubiquitous in everyday New Brunswick life.
If you’ve ever looked at a historic black-and-white photo on the wall of a New Brunswick bar, restaurant, café, or office, odds are, it was taken by George Taylor. His photos hang in Pizza Delights, government buildings, and even as a 20-foot print in the Picaroons Roundhouse.
Credit for his work surviving and his becoming popular again today partly belongs to Lord Beaverbrook, who had something of a long-standing obsession with George Taylor’s work. He sent a team to scour New Brunswick for the glass negatives of George Thomas Taylor's photos in the 1950s.
He collected and preserved hundreds of photographs, eventually donating them to the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. Today, nearly 1,000 of George Taylor’s glass negatives are stored there, opened to the public since 1967.
So even if you didn’t know his name until now, you’ve probably seen what George Taylor saw — through the lens of one of the world’s first nature photographers.
Many, many more of George Thomas Taylor's photos can be found in a coffee table book called Slow Seconds: The Photography Of George Thomas Taylor by Joshua Green (photo manager at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick and voice actor on the Backyard History Podcast!) and Ronald Rees.
