During the last twenty five years of the nineteenth century, photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson traveled to remote areas of great natural beauty, set up their cameras, and created realistic monochrome (B&W) pictures of grand vistas. By the turn of the twentieth century, Pictorialists had blurred the boundary between painting and photography by using traditional painting compositional forms, tinting, and processes like Bromoil printing to make photographs look like monochrome paintings. The Pictorialists greatly influenced the course of modern art because their photographic images were the inspiration for the Impressionist painters. Conversely, the art world’s acceptance of Impressionism legitimized the pictorialists and firmly established photography as an art form.

After 1930, American landscape photography was profoundly influenced by the F64 Group a loose association of prominent photographers (Ansel Adams, Immogene Cuningham, Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbot, Lewis Hine, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, and others) who eschewed soft focus, intrusive personal technique, stylized processes, and compositional forms from other artistic disciplines in favor of tack sharp focus, simple composition, and straightforward processing. The members of F64 felt that realistic photography was on a higher artistic plane than Pictorialism. Their rebellion against the prevailing photographic philosophy of their era (like the rebellion of the Dadaists and Surrealists against Impresionism) created a new artistic aesthetic that still influences photography today. After F64, American landscape photographers religiously shot the same sort of monochromatic grand Western vistas that had originally attracted noted nineteenth century landscape photographers like O’Sullivan and Jackson.

Absolutist movements inevitably inspire rebellion because rigidity and creative arrogance discourage diversity and new ideas. When compositional rules become more important than the artistic aesthetic behind them radical new artists magically appear to question popular convention. Eliot Porter was a loner and an artistic maverick who set out to broaden the scope of landscape photography by narrowing its scale. Porter shot small slices of the grand vista that were so complex and detailed they were almost tactile, and he committed the ultimate heresy by shooting his intimate landscapes in color rather than black and white.

Eliot Porter

Eliot Porter (1901-1990) grew up near Chicago. His father introduced him (and his brother Fairfield) to the beauty of the natural world at an early age. Porter’s family was wealthy and in 1910 his father purchased Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. The island became the family's summer home and in 1912 Porter started taking pictures with a Kodak “Brownie” camera. Young Eliot began his lifelong love affair with photography by photographing birds in the forests and fields near his homes in Illinois and Maine.

Porter attended Harvard and received his medical degree in 1929. After his graduation Porter worked as a biochemical researcher and taught classes part time at Harvard. By the early thirties Porter was spending all his free time honing his photographic skills. After meeting Ansel Adams and viewing his photographs at Steiglitz’s An American Place Gallery, Porter decided to give up medicine and biomedical research and dedicate himself full time to photography. Porter was introduced to Alfred Steiglitz, the dean of American photographers (and the husband of artist Georgia O’Keefe) by his brother Fairfield. Encouraged by Adams and Stieglitz, Porter started using a large format camera and less than a year later his images were gracing the walls of An American Place.

Porter, unlike most of his contemporaries, understood how and why the scene in front of his camera was relevant to a larger and more complex world. He was drawn to record not only the grand vistas that defined American landscape photography, but also scenes like the mini-environment around a bird’s nest or an intimate view of lush ferns shrouding the decaying trunk of a fallen forest giant. Porter understood how biodiversity increases exponentially where natural systems intersect (the water's edge or the point where forest meets prairie) and the importance of seasonal cycles of growth and decay. His science background and laboratory training was a natural adjunct to his love of photography and nature. Porter was the first photographer to passionately understand and depict the riotous chaos of the natural world.

What Eliot Porter really wanted was to work in color, but in the mid nineteen thirties color photography was a brand new medium. Kodachrome, the world’s first widely available color film, was developed by two Rochester New York Chamber Musicians named Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, who did all the lab work in the kitchen of their apartment. Kodak asked Porter to test the color balance and saturation of the new film and help Kodak's engineers refine the Kodachrome emulsion. Porter shot batch after batch of the new film stock while Kodak built the the manufacturing plant and labs to make and process Kodachrome film.(1936-38) amateur photographers fell in love with the film’s bright look and highly saturated colors and Kodachrome was an immediate success. Professional photographers (aside from Porter) showed no interest in Kodachrome.

In 1940 Porter started working with a new print process called dye transfer. The dye transfer process was a new additive printing process that worked much like Kodachrome except the end product was a paper print. The process allows photographers absolute control over image color because each dye layer (cyan, magenta and yellow) can be adjusted incrementally and separately. Dye transfer prints provide accurate color balance and saturation, superb resolution, and excellent longevity. Mannes and Godowsky continued to work with film emulsions and in 1946 developed the Ektachrome emulsion, which Porter once again helped Kodak test and refine. Kodachrome and Ektachrome are transparency films and produce positives rather than negatives so both emulsions lend themselves beautifully to the dye transfer printing process.

Over a period of almost fifty years Porter shot thousands of Kodachrome and Ektachrome images of American birds, colorful Mexican churches and Greek and Egyptian ruins, and intimate landscapes in Maine, New Mexico, Arizona, the Smoky Mountains, Antarctica, and the Galapagos Islands. His dye transfer prints became legendary for their beautiful colors, tack sharp resolution, nuanced depth, and incredible longevity.

For more than a century photography had been completely dominated by Black and white images, but by the late nineteen fifties beautiful color images were starting to show up in fashion magazines, advertising, and even in photojournalistic icons like Look and Life magazines. Kodachrome was at the forefront of this color imaging revolution and Porter was no longer the only photographer working in color. Pete Turner, Eliot Elisofon, Marc Riboud, Cecil Beaton, Ernst Haas, Phillipe Halsman, and Gordon Parks helped drive the mass market switch from Black & White to color images.

In 1962, Porter published “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World” the very first coffee table book. The lavish book was the first art book ever published by the Sierra Club, a San Francisco nature outing and social club founded by environmentalist John Muir. The Sierra Club’s first publishing venture was the initial salvo in a war to wrest control of U. S. public lands from exploitative mining, timber, power and water utilities, and farming/ranching interests. The club, under the leadership of David Brower, positioned itself to become the dominant force in the struggle to protect America’s wild lands. Porter’s book combined stunning large format color images with quotations from Henry David Thoreau extolling the virtues of wilderness. Thoreau’s slightly seditious quotations appealed to the rebellious spirit of the generation that came of age during the turbulent sixties and Porter’s obvious reverence for nature appealed to politically liberal "pro preservation" middle class professionals.

The book was an immediate success and brought about an almost mystical convergence of diverse philosophies; the vision of nature as the balm to heal society’s wounds, the concept that art had the power to affect positive social change, and the Sierra Club’s activist political agenda to halt the resolute march of development and environmental destruction in America’s remaining wilderness areas. Porter’s book put the Sierra Club on the national map and made David Brower a genuine power in American politics. “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World” launched a very successful series of popular photographic books designed to promote a new environmental movement in the United States.

David Brower (also known as the Arch Druid) used the profits from these photography books to lobby, cajole, persuade, and occasionally bludgeon congress and the media to prevent further destruction of American wilderness. Brower’s tactics were very successful and the Sierra Club became the driving force behind the emerging American environmental movement. Years later the fractious alliance between radical youth, affluent middle class professionals, and political/environmental activists imploded. The Sierra Club moved to fire Brower, saying his activism was causing dissent and animosity with the club's membership. There were two famous photographers on the club’s board, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter----Adams voted to dump Brower and Porter voted to retain him. The Sierra Club fired Brower, who went on to found Earth First.

By the nineteen seventies Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter had become the most famous American photographers of the twentieth century. Adams's work had distinct ties to the great Western landscape photographers of the nineteenth century, but Porter was always a pioneer; one of the first photographers to seriously explore the new medium of color photography. Ansel Adams always said he felt color photography was too limiting and didn’t pack the same emotional punch as black-and-white, but Porter (who basically invented the color landscape genre) traveled the globe shooting intimate landscapes that packed enough emotional power to inspire environmental activists and seriously influence the movement to limit development in the American West, Antarctica, and the Galapagos Islands.

About the Book

The Color of Wildness is the first in-depth retrospective of Porter's work. The book presents a gilt edged invitation to viewers to see the natural world through Porter's eyes and appreciate the breathtaking variety, complexity, frailty, chaos, and beauty. Among the most striking images in the book are, “Ice Cave, Scott base, Ross Island, Antartica, December 7, 1975”, “Pool in Hidden Passage, Glen Canyon, Utah”, and the gorgeous cover image of a Luna Moth.

The Color of Wildness is a beautiful book , filled with wonderful and sensitive photographs. Over the course of his long and productive life, Porter shot an unbelievably wide range of subjects. Intimate landscapes from coastal Maine, the arid desert scapes of New Mexico and Arizona, the Galapagos Islands, and Antarctica; China, Greek and Egyptian ruins in the Old World and Mexican Churches in the New World.

The Color of Wildness shows how Porter's love of the natural world led directly to his committment to the preservation movement and his fascination with the cultural roots of mankind. The essay by John Rohrbach details Porter's incredible journey from shy biomedical researcher to color photography pioneer and finally world famous ”auteur” of the intimate landscape concept. The short memoir by Jonathan Porter, who often accompanied his father on globetrotting photographic expeditions, explains Eliot Porter's passionate love of nature and his fascination with the world he lived in and its inhabitants.

The Color of Wildness poses thought provoking questions about art, the intrinsic value of the natural world, and the power of photography as a tool to bring about meaningful social change. The images collected in Eliot Porter The Color of Wildness beautifully and passionately chronicle the life's work of one of the most important photographic artists of the twentieth century.

Conclusion

Eliot Porter's photography helped to pioneer a new way of seeing the world we live in. Color photography is so ubiquitous now that it’s hard to understand there was a time when we were obliged to view the world in Black and White. Porter’s groundbreaking efforts helped to promote the widespread acceptance of color photography as an artistic medium and encouraged a whole new generation of photographers who shot their images in color. Porter’s creation of the “intimate landscape” concept was just as important to the development of photography as an art form as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “Decisive Moment”.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Eliot Porter (or if you enjoy exceptional photography) here are a couple of websites featuring Porter’s images. Just “cut & paste” the URL into your browser’s address bar.

Images from “The Color of Wildness”

http://photography.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.afterimagegallery.com/porterinwildness.htm

A selection of Porter’s images of Glenn Canyon from ”The Place No One Knew”

http://photography.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://afterimagegallery.com/porterglencanyon.htm

The Color Of Wildness
Photographs by Eliot Porter (1936-1985)
with Essays by John Rohrbach and Rebecca Solnit
and a Memoir by Jonathan Porter
Aperture, 2001
ISBN: 0-89381-9646-6
152 pages, 110 color and duotone images
$60.00

Technical Notes

Porter used a tripod mounted large format (8x10) camera to shoot slow speed Ektachrome and Kodachrome transparencies. The transparencies were used to create Porter’s trademark dye transfer prints.

Links

The books listed below showcase the work of other artistically and historically significant twentieth century photographers.

Annie Leibovitz’ “Women”
http://www.epinions.com/content_64482283140

Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt
http://www.epinions.com/content_48401321604

Doisneau: Retrospective by Peter Hamilton
http://www.epinions.com/content_42163605124

“Haunter of Ruins” The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin
http://www.epinions.com/content_35055898244

“Live Steam” Paddlewheel Steamboats on the Mississippi System by John Kral
http://www.epinions.com/content_31470227076/tk_~CB005.1.7

“Not Fade Away” The Rock and Roll Photography of Jim Marshall
http://www.epinions.com/content_20411747972

Wynn Bullock “The Enchanted Landscape” Photographs 1940-1975
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-5DDB-80C8F3E-39DB828E-prod1

“Atkins—Girls Night Out” by Chloe Atkins
http://www.epinions.com/content_28351106692/tk_~CB008.1.1


Recommended: Yes