Eliot Porter - Cypress Slough and Mist, Cypress Lodge, Punta Gorda, Florida (detail), photo via featured blog palmbeachpost com

Eliot Porter / Eliot Furness Porter

October 4, 2013

American photographer Eliot Porter is best known for pioneering color photographs of nature. Throughout his career spanning several decades, he has elevated color photography to fine art. His work possessed a vivid balance of detail and tone. Although he began taking black and white photographs, he quickly realized that it was impossible to distinguish the fine details of different types of birds. By his own ingenuity, he successfully developed techniques that allowed him to capture the elusive species, which up to that point was impossible due to their flight speed. Today Porter's work is in several renowned private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

From a Hobby to a Profession

From a young age, Eliot Porter (born in 1901 in Winnetka, IL) took amateur photographs of nature. Most of his early works were shots taken on the Great Spruce Head Island, a family-owned island in Maine. However, he went on to study chemical engineering at Harvard College and went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School with a Doctor of Medicine degree. Encouraged by his brother Fairfield Porter, a painter and art critic, he returned to photography. Upon meeting photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, he turned his hobby into a career. Stieglitz, amazed by his work, organized his first solo exhibition in 1938 at his An American Place gallery.

Color Photography

In the 1940s, Porter transitioned from black and white to color photography. Unfortunately, the slow speed of the Kodachrome color film turned out to be quite a challenge as it required a lot of light for proper exposures. The combination of a large format camera and large flashbulbs meant he did not have a lot of mobility, and thus he had to spend a lot of time not moving and waiting for the birds to come to him. The artist's work is of immense ornithological importance because of the exquisite details, tone, composition, and refined technique.

In 1943 Porter was the first photographer to exhibit color photography at the Museum of Modern Art, which was a huge success. In 1953 he published his first color nature book entitled American Birds: 10 Photographs in Color. The artist slowly began taking landscape photographs, and in 1962 published a bestselling book, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, in which he combined his work with Henry David Thoreau's quotes.

Eliot Porter's Portfolio

The artist was a member of the Sierra Club (environmental preservation organization); later, from 1965 to 1971, he became director. Throughout his career, he traveled extensively all over the world, including Antarctica, Iceland, the Galápagos Islands, and East Africa, capturing nature's beauty. The book The Place No One Knew features photographs of Glen Canyon before the Lake Powell reservoir flooded it. Eliot Porter passed away in 1990 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Featured image: Eliot Porter - Cypress Slough and Mist, Cypress Lodge, Punta Gorda, Florida (detail), photo via featured blog.palmbeachpost.com

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