ELIOT FURNESS PORTER

By Colin Russell

Who is Eliot Porter Eliot Furness Porter was born on December 6 1901 and died on

November 2 1990. Mr. Porter was an American Photographer and was best known for his

color photographs of nature. Eliot was among first to successfully bridge the gap between

photography as a fine art and its roots in science and technology. Mr. Porter promoted use of color photography from the 1940s-mid 1970s

at a time when most serious photographers worked in black and white. Mr. Porter work was widely published and used as a powerful visual

argument for nature conversation.

Early life From a suburb of Chicago in a town called Winnetka,

Illinois, Eliot was the second of five children in an upper-middle-class family. His father was an amateur architect and natural history enthusiast which managed the family’s Chicago real estate and infused in his children a love of learning and the sciences. His mother, a Bryn Mawr graduate, shared her active support for liberal social causes. Eliot received his first camera in 1911in which he immediately challenged himself to photograph birds, first around his Winnetka home and then at the family’s summer retreat, Great Spruce Head Island, in Penobscot Bay, Maine. Eliot was sent east for high school and he followed family tradition by enrolling at Harvard, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1923 and a medical degree in 1929.

Accomplisments

In 1962 he gained a major boost when the Sierra Club published "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World." That immensely popular book, combining his evocative color photographs of New England woods with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized photographic book publishing by setting new standards for design and printing and proving the commercial viability of fine art photography books. Its success set Porter on a lifelong path of creating similar photographic portraits of a wide variety of ecologically significant places the world over. Eliot porter published twenty-five books and was working on several more when he died in 1990.

Books in Unusual Places

The success of "In Wildness" and subsequent photographic celebrations of Glen Canyon in Utah, Maine, and the Adirondacks, Mr. Porter moved increasingly farther afield to photograph and complete books with more distant and unusual sites. Such places included Baja California, Mexico, the Galápagos, East Africa, and Antarctica, all of which drew his attention because of their diversity and the environmental stresses they faced.

Commitment

Throughout Eliot Porter he remained committed to making and exhibiting dye transfer color prints of his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, when lines between art and natural history museums were more fluid, he was just as likely to show at the American Museum of Natural History as the Museum of Modern Art. Art museums’ gradual acceptance of color in the 1960s and 1970s led to a regular stream of monographic exhibitions at both large and small venues.

Some of his photographs

Photographs cont.