| Arthur C. Pillsbury Gallery |
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AC first visited Yosemite in 1895, returning in 1897 with his brother, Ernest. It was in 1895 he first encountered the Snow Plant, an amazing presence in Yosemite.
Botany had been an interest all of his life. When he bought the Studio of the Three Arrows in 1906 he began to study the flowers more closely, noticing that some varieties were disappearing each year. That moved him to begin to offer to tourists specimen cards, colored by hand in those days without color photography. Each card had information about that variety on its reverse side.
His lectures on Yosemite and its wonders, including the wild flowers, began in 1909. In 1910 he made and showed the first nature movie. In 1912 he designed and built the first lapse-time camera to be used with plants.
The first nature center had been born; today all others follow the pattern he began. Enjoy the flowers, as he said, ?Beauty, Form, and Color, the Rhythm of movement, express art everywhere. The story of a bud opening, a leaf unfolding, a seed germinating, all the various steps of its life struggle for perpetuation, is as interesting and poignant as one's own life's happenings. Step by step the lens has registered on a sensitive film of a lapse-time, motor-driven motion camera, recording in that way in a comparatively few seconds life efforts that may take days or even weeks to happen....."
Each of these images began life as a specimen card.
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