Photog’s bookshelf: Eliot Porter

Fern Glen Canyon, Colorado River mile 168, Grand Canyon National Park

Earlier this month, I blogged about my project to assemble a small reference library on photography. Here is a write-up of one of my first additions to my collection, Eliot Porter.

Eliot Porter, photographs and text by Eliot Porter, was published in 1987 as a companion to a retrospective showing of the photographer’s work at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. Porter wrote the autobiographic text on his life and career to accompany 128 color plates, collecting in one place Porter’s work of six decades.

Eliot Porter (1901-1990), America’s first important color nature photographer, came to his artistic career late in life, training as a physician and working in biomedical research at Harvard University until his late thirties. Around 1930, just as he was renewing his childhood interest in photography, he met Ansel Adams at a dinner party. Adams politely looked at his photographs and advised him to get a large-format camera to help improve Porter’s work. About the same time, Porter also met Alfred Stieglitz, owner of the first New York gallery to show Ansel Adams’ photography. For eight years, Porter persisted in bringing new work to Stieglitz; in 1938 Stieglitz stunned him by offering to put on his first show.

Porter quit medicine to pursue photography, and in particular his passion for bird photography. A small family trust supported his efforts, which were interrupted by civilian work in the war effort. A lifelong naturalist, one of Porter’s passions was bird photography, writing that “The bird photographs I had seen in publications, such as Audubon Magazine, were mostly of such poor quality that I was determined to raise the standards by which bird photographs are judged to those applicable to other fields of photography.” He began photographing birds in their natural environments, supplemented with artificial light, in the late 1930s. When an editor told him that his images had to be in color for publication, he began working with the newly developed Kodachrome transparency film (with an ASA of only 5!).

Persistence could have been Porter’s nickname. Printing color transparencies involved an elaborate process of three separation negatives consecutively transferred to the same gelatin-coated paper. The resulting matrices could be used to reproduce prints, but were fragile, and the print papers could take a half hour to absorb the dyes.

Living in Santa Fe after the war, Porter explored many other facets of the nature world with his camera. Porter’s first book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, which paired his images with quotations by Henry Thoreau, began his lifelong association with the Sierra Club and the conservation movement. In the 1960s, the Sierra Club under the leadership of David Brower, published a number of high quality books to advocate the then-new concept of conservation. Porter’s book, published in 1964, was the first in the series printed in color.

Porter’s decision to work in color was controversial among his peers. Ansel Adams left the room rather than look at Porter’s final images for the Thoreau book. Others agreed that color was too literal for true fine art. At the same time, he was criticized for his colors being unnatural, although Porter insisted that he only showed things, like the blue reflected in desert varnish on Colorado Plateau’s red rock, that others simply overlooked.
In 1960, Porter made the first of 11 trips to Glen Canyon along the middle Colorado River. The Sierra Club had opposed a dam that would have flooded Dinosaur National Monument, and suggested that the Bureau of Reclamation instead build at the site of the Glen Canyon Dam, a policy decision the Club tried and failed to reverse. Brower, who called the dam “America’s most regretted environmental mistake” published Porter’s second book, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado.

In his mid-sixties, Porter’s productivity accelerated: in six years he published books about the Adirondaks, Maine, the Galapagos and the Great Smoky Mountains. Not until 1972 would he find a publisher for Birds of North Ameria. In his mid-seventies, Porter embarked on two extensive trips with the National Science Foundation to Antarctica, and visited China in after the age of 80.
The images selected for the 1987 Amon Carter retrospective span six decades of Porter’s career, including an image made only months before going to press. Remarkable across the vast body of work is the consistency in how Porter chooses to frame the natural world. Images like “Rock, Lichen, Dead Hellebore,” “Apples” and “Erratic Boulder” span over forty years of his career, but look like they could have been made on the same day.

Porter’s compositions would have failed “camera club 101″ as his mastery of complexity in nature did not lend itself to the “rule of thirds.” Images like “Peeling Birch Bark” and “Foxtail Grass” organize a threatening amount of detail into pleasing rhythms.

Down-selecting from Porter’s body of work to 128 color plates necessarily results in hard choices; arguably different pictures from any one project could have been chosen instead, but there are no poor selections, if not the most well-known images of Porter’s on every page.

The color plates in this book, now over 20 years old, are still bright and equisitively detailed. Most of the reproductions are near the original size of Porter’s prints, and his autobiographical introduction is charmingly self-effacing in its simple recounting his life and impact as one of the first conservation photographers. The final paragraphs on the art of photography touch on his views to color, composition and emotional content of his images:

“Sensitivity cannot be faked by trickor devise; it has no substitute, and any attempt to replace it with mechancial contrivances is certain to be apparent to the more discerning critics. Not all photographs have to be inspired to be worth making, but the best, rare photographs are the result of a a force at least very close to inspiration. Formulized work becomes impersonal, an all the individuality of authorship tends to disappear. It unquestionably has its uses, but it is not art.”

The book itself echoes Porter’s ability to redact nature’s chaos into a single harmonious image, and is a well-deserved tribute to this pioneer of color nature photography.

On the bookshelf:

Eliot Porter, photographs and text by Eliot Porter. Published by New York Graphic Society Books, 1987, ISBN 082121679.
Price: originally $60, paid $22.50 for a fine quality first edition at Sam Wellers Zion Bookstore on 5 February 2010. Amazon link
In a nutshell: a comprehensive retrospective of a pioneering figure in color photography
Essential for every photographer? There is a great value in studying a lifetime’s work of a single artist. If nature photography isn’t a passion, then choose a similar book on a different photographer: Walker Evans or Henri Cartier-Bresson for the documentary shooters; portrait fans might pick Yousuf Karsh or Irving Penn. Tracing the development of a legendary photographer’s body of work through the decades and seeing how the work relates to/creates/bucks the prevailing trends of its times can help an aspiring artist mature into a personal style of one’s own.

Further reading:

• Porter collection at the Amon Carter Museum.

• Exhibition notes from a 2006 retrospective at the Getty museum.
• Transcript of an interview with David Brower by Ken Verdoia of KUED in the 1990s on Brower’s last ditch efforts to stop the Glen Canyon Dam and his views on the impact of that failure for modern conservation.