2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
