Deadwood

Greg Fallis

In Homage To...

Eliot Porter

Eliot Porter (1901-1990) was an American photographer best known for his color nature photographs. He was the brother of Fairfield Porter, a realist painter and art critic.

After earning degrees in chemical engineering and medicine, Porter worked as a biochemical researcher at Harvard. An amateur photographer since childhood, his work was shown by Alfred Stieglitz in his New York City gallery An American Place in 1938. This initial success caused Porter to leave his post at Harvard and pursue photography full-time. In the 1940s, he began working in color with Eastman Kodak's new dye transfer process.

Porter became well-known after the publication of his first book, "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World" (1962). Published by the Sierra Club, the book featured Porter's color nature studies of the New England woods and quotes by Henry David Thoreau. "In Wildness..." (often misquoted as "In Wilderness") was a best-seller, and several editions have been printed.

Porter traveled extensively to photograph ecologically important and culturally significant places. He published books of photographs from Glen Canyon(Utah), Maine, Baja California, the Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, East Africa, and Iceland. His cultural subjects included Mexico, Egypt, China, and ancient Greek sites.

James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) caused Porter to reexamine his work in the context of chaos theory. The book Nature's Chaos (1990) combined photographs from Porter's career with quotes from Gleick.

Porter's primary method of printing photographs was the dye transfer process.

Porter bequeathed his personal archive to the Amon Carter Museum.