Eliot Porter
Eliot Porter was born in 1901 to a wealthy family in Chicago, Illinois. He was fortunate to have parents that nurtured an interested in natural history and the sciences. Porter was given his first camera in 1911, and Eliot Porter immediately took to capturing birds on the family estate in Winnetka, and then at the family holiday home on Great Spruce Head Island, in the Bay of Penobscot, Maine. He enrolled at Harvard, graduating with a degree in chemical engineering followed by one in medicine. Even though his took up a post as a biochemical researcher, he could never quite let go of his passion for photography. His brother the famous artist Fairfield Porter introduced him to acclaimed photographers, Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz. In turn Ansel introduced Eliot Porter to the Sierra Club, of which he became a member and staunch supporter.
The prevailing artistic medium was black and white photography, but Eliot Porter opposed this by producing almost all his work entirely in color, using the dye transfer method to produce superb and high quality pictures. In 1938, Stieglitz invited him to exhibit his photographs at An American Place, his well known New York Art Gallery. This launched his as a prominent photographic artist who rivalled his contemporaries of the time. He left his medical career to pursue photography as a full time, choosing to focus on the colorful and diverse natural world. It took him many places, particularly to woodland areas thus turning him into an established artist-photographer.
The Sierra Club enhanced his reputation when the published what was to become a popular book entitled “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World”. It gave him much needed boost. His work was combined with Henry David Thoreau’s writings and took set new standards in publishing by revolutionizing and promoting the commercial viability of photographic books. This success urged Eliot Porter to pursue photographic excellence and continue to produce a variety of similar books highlighting the diversity to found in ecologically noteworthy significant places that was to be found throughout the world. He shifted his focus to included environmental stress, to be found in the Galapagos, East African and the Antartic and then the closer to home in Mexico, and Baja California. He moved on to include cultural topics completing a study of classical Greek and Egyptian.
During his life time his published 25 books, with a few more that had been in the pipeline at the time of his death. Eliot Porter was survived by his second wife and five children, after he had settled in Tesuque, in New Mexico. His career has spanned more than 50 years, having exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum, the Art Museum of the University of New Mexico and the Amon Carter Museum in Texas. Eliot Porter bequeathed his entire collection to the Amon Carter Museum along with some personal effects. He truly made his mark in the world of wild life photography and creating a superb foundation for color natural photography.
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