• About the Work of Art

• Activities for Twilight Canyon, Glen Canyon, Utah, May 26, 1962
   

   

From an early age, Eliot Porter enjoyed the untamed natural world. He was interested in how the seasons changed, enjoyed waiting for flowers to bloom, collected moths and butterflies, and looked for birds’ nests. His enthusiasm for nature comes through clearly in the photographs he took throughout his life.

Porter’s father introduced his children to the natural world through geology, biology, and astronomy. When the artist was eight years old, his family purchased Great Spruce Head Island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. On this island and in the suburbs north of Chicago, Porter began photographing birds and their surroundings after he received a simple Brownie box camera for his eleventh birthday.

Chemistry was one of Porter’s favorite subjects during his high school years. This interest led to a degree in chemical engineering from Harvard University. Then, after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1929, Porter taught and conducted research in bacteriology and biochemistry for ten years. During this period, he started photographing regularly. He developed new standards for his photographs of birds and for the field of ornithological photography in general. The birds he photographed had to be clearly identifiable, and they had to be presented in pleasing, carefully balanced compositions that would engage viewers.

In 1938 Porter’s photographs appeared in a solo exhibition at Alfred Steiglitz’s gallery, An American Place, in New York. This exhibition brought him wide critical acclaim, providing him with the impetus to leave his scientific career to pursue photography full time. A personal challenge inspired Porter to photograph in color. The following year he took a group of black-and-white bird portraits to a publisher, he was told that the images would be much more useful for identifying species of birds and more marketable if they were in color. So, in 1939, decades before color photography was widely used, Porter taught himself an early version of the complex dye transfer process of color photographic printing.

By 1950 Porter had established a routine of photographing birds each spring and other subjects during the rest of the year. Much of his attention was focused on the nature subjects he so loved, both in the southwestern United States (where he made his home in 1946) and in New England. The Sierra Club’s 1962 publication of his popular book In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World opened new opportunities to combine photographs with text. In a second book, The Place No One Knew, Porter again teamed up with David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, to stop the damming of Glen Canyon. The book did not stop the dam, but the interest it aroused showed Porter how photographs could create public awareness of endangered places.

He continued to produce large picture books that drew attention to significant ecological sites across different parts of the United States and, increasingly, around the world, from the Adirondacks to Antarctica. Late in his career, Porter expanded his vision to include architecture and people as subjects, completing studies of classical Greece, ancient Egypt, and China.

Over a forty-year period, Porter produced more than 80,000 transparencies and 7,600 color prints. Eliot Porter’s life achievements as a photographer are preserved at the Amon Carter Museum.

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