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Eliot Furness Porter

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Eliot Furness Porter

American, (1901–1990)
Eliot Furness Porter was an American photographer best known for his color photographs of nature. One of Porter's five siblings was the painter and art critic Fairfield Porter. Fairfield Porter introduced his older brother to photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in about 1930. In 1938, Stieglitz presented Porter's work, taken with a Linhof view camera, in his New York City gallery, An American Place. The exhibit's success prompted Porter to pursue photography full-time. Porter began working with a new color film, Kodachrome, introduced in 1935, but it presented considerable technical challenges, especially for capturing fast-moving birds. Drawing on his chemical engineering and research background Porter experimented extensively until he was able to produce satisfactory images. His bird photographs were exhibited in 1943, the first ever exhibition of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. For twenty years, Porter pursued a project to publish nature photographs combined with quotes from works by Henry David Thoreau. His 1962 book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World featured Porter's color nature studies of the New England woods. The book enjoyed considerable success despite its high price, pioneered the genre of the nature photography coffee-table book, and lead to several other titles by Porter in a similar format published by the Sierra Club and others. It increased Porter's reputation greatly, and he served as a director of the Sierra Club from 1965 to 1971. In 1979 the work of Eliot Porter was exhibited in Intimate Landscapes, the first one-person show of color photography at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This exhibition earned Porter praise as the individual who brought credibility to color photography as a medium of fine art. The image selection defined what is now meant by the term “intimate landscape”: the close-range, quiet compositions of natural elements with muted colors and dense textures, meditative and dense with layered meanings, which were the hallmark of Porter's work at the exclusion of more expansive and spectacular landscapes.


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