Eliot Porter

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American photographer Eliot Furness Porter is known for his brightly colored pictures of nature. On December 6, 1901, he was born, and he died on November 2, 1990. Fairfield Porter, Eliot Porter's brother, was a realist painter and art expert, and this was something that stood out. Michael W. Straus, who was his brother-in-law, worked as a commissioner for the United States Bureau of Reclamation. In 1927, Eliot got married to Marian Brown, but they split up in 1934. He married Aline Kilham in 1936, and the two of them moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. From 1946 on, they lived in Tesuque, New Mexico.

Eliot Porter said that his father, James Porter, was the reason why he cared so much about science and nature. As a young amateur shooter, he got his first ideas from taking pictures of birds on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine, which his family owned. Porter went to Harvard College and got a Bachelor of Arts in chemical engineering. He went to Harvard Medical School to learn more and got a Doctor of Medicine degree. After he graduated, he stayed at Harvard to do study in medicine. Fairfield Porter, the painter and art critic, was one of Eliot Porter's five brothers and sisters. Around 1930, Fairfield Porter was very important in putting his older brother in touch with Alfred Stieglitz, a famous photographer and gallery owner. Stieglitz was impressed by Eliot Porter's work and told him to keep getting better. Last but not least, in 1938, Stieglitz showed Eliot's pictures, which were taken with a Linhof view camera, at his famous New York City store called An American Place. The show did so well that Eliot Porter decided to devote himself fully to a career in photography.


Eliot Porter became interested in color photography when a publisher turned down his idea for a book about birds because black-and-white pictures wouldn't show the differences between species well enough. In answer, Porter began to try out Kodachrome, a new color film that came out in 1935. But catching birds that move quickly was very hard to do technically. Porter used his experience in chemical engineering and study to do a lot of tests until he got results he was happy with.

In 1943, Eliot Porter's photos of birds were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This was the first time that color photographs had been shown at the famous museum. In 1953, he also put out a book called "American Birds: 10 Color Photographs." In 1955, he had a one-person show of his work at the Limelight Gallery in New York City.

Porter worked on a project for twenty years that combined photos of nature with lines from Henry David Thoreau's writings. But he didn't find an editor who was interested until a friend put him in touch with the head of the Sierra Club. In 1962, his book "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World" came out. It had color pictures of the woods in New England. Even though it was expensive, the book sold a lot of copies and was one of the first coffee-table books about nature photography. Porter's fame grew because of this, and from 1965 to 1971, he was a member of the Sierra Club. In 1971, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences chose him to be a Fellow.

Eliot Porter's work was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1979. The show, called "Intimate Landscapes," was the first solo show of color photography. This show gave Porter more credit for making color photography a legitimate form of fine art. His intimate landscape compositions, which were made up of close-up, quiet natural elements with soft colors and rich textures, became his defining style and set him apart from artists who painted big, grand landscapes.

Porter went a lot to take pictures of places that were important ecologically and culturally. He wrote books with photos from places like the Glen Canyon in Utah, Maine, Baja California, the Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, East Africa, and Iceland. He also looked into culture topics in Mexico, Egypt, China, Czechoslovakia, and sites from ancient Greece. In his book about Glen Canyon, called "The Place No One Knew," he wrote about how it looked before it was covered by Lake Powell.

In 1987, James Gleick's book "Chaos: Making a New Science" came out. This made Eliot Porter rethink his work in terms of chaos theory. They worked together on a project that led to the release of "Nature's Chaos" in 1990. The book included photographs by Porter and a new essay by Gleick. Eliot Porter died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1990, and he left his personal library to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas...