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Porter, Eliot

Eliot Furness Porter
Born (1901-12-06)December 6, 1901
Winnetka, Illinois, United States
Died November 2, 1990(1990-11-02) (aged 88)
Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
Known for Photography
Notable work Color nature photographs

Eliot Furness Porter (December 6, 1901 – November 2, 1990) was an American photographer best known for his color photographs of nature.

An amateur photographer since childhood, he was known for photographing the Great Spruce Head Island owned by his family. Porter earned degrees in chemical engineering (A. B. 1924, Harvard College) and medicine (M.D. 1929, Harvard University), and worked as a biochemical researcher at Harvard.

After meeting photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in 1934, Porter showed his work to Stieglitz, who continued to critique Porter’s black-and-white work, taken with a Linhof view camera. In 1938, Stieglitz showed Porter's work in his New York City gallery, An American Place. The exhibit's success prompted Porter to leave Harvard in 1939 to pursue photography full-time.

It was around this period when he began to shift his attention to color film after a book proposal on birds was rejected because the publisher believed black and white wouldn't clearly differentiate the various species. Color photography up to this point was exclusively used in a documentary capacity. Porter, ever the scientist, sought to master it in an effort to get a book on birds published. In the 1940s, he began working in color with Eastman Kodak's new color film, Kodachrome to achieve this end.

Porter's reputation increased following the publication of his 1962 book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World. Published by the Sierra Club, the book featured Porter's color nature studies of the New England woods and quotes by Henry David Thoreau. A best-seller, several editions of the book have been printed. Porter served as a director of the Sierra Club from 1965 to 1971. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.

Porter traveled extensively to photograph ecologically important and culturally significant places. He published books of photographs from Glen Canyon in Utah, Maine, Baja California, Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, East Africa, and Iceland. His cultural studies included Mexico, Egypt, China, Czechoslovakia, and ancient Greek sites. His book on Glen Canyon, The Place No One Knew, memorialized the canyon's appearance before its inundation by the Lake Powell reservoir.


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