Color was in photographer's nature
By Anonymous Sunday, September 03, 2006, 02:35 PM EDT
LIVING COLOR
By combining the rich hues of Kodachrome film with the complex process of dye-transfer printing, Porter proved that black-and-white nature photography, as practiced by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, could be expanded to include the entire color spectrum.
Through his master prints, portfolio editions and groundbreaking publications created in collaboration with the Sierra Club, Porter changed the face of photography.
"Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature," on display at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles through Sept. 17, is a testament to Porter's photographic craft, the subtlety of his vision and the love of wilderness that inspired him.
"Eliot Porter is significant in more than one area," observed curator Paul Martineau, who spent a year researching and designing the Getty's exhibition. "He's significant as a photographer who pushed to bring respect to the color medium at a time when serious art photographers were more interested in black and white and didn't think color was valid.
"He's also significant for his meticulous photography of birds in the field," Martineau said. It's a subject to which the Getty has devoted an entire gallery.
Porter, who died in 1990, often worked for the Audubon Society's magazine and had a number of shows in natural history museums, Martineau said. One of his earliest exhibits was at New York's Bronx Zoo.
"He was a naturalist whose love of nature stemmed from his summers as a boy in Maine and his relationship with his father, who was an amateur geologist," Martineau said. "He had a purist's idea of the natural world and believed you should approach nature (like Henry David Thoreau) with a pack on your back."
Sitting in the white glare of the Getty Museum's plaza, Martineau admitted that his introduction to Porter's work was somewhat by chance.
"I discovered Porter through my storeroom work (as the department of photography's collections manager). When I opened the boxes, I fell in love with the material," he said.
After getting the go-ahead, Martineau made plans to visit the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, which contains the greatest repository of Porter's work, including 7,000 prints.
"When I went to do my research at the Amon Carter," he explained, "I discovered Porter's early black-and-white work, which I'd never seen before. I decided it had to be included in our exhibit in order for people to understand the progression of his career.
"The exhibition begins with these black-and-white photographs that he produced between 1934 and 1940," Martineau said. "The rest of the show is dedicated to the color work that begins in 1940 and ends in the 1980s."
The exhibit includes 80 prints: 34 from the Amon Carter Museum and the rest from the Getty's permanent collection and on loan from collectors.
AN ISLAND AND A CAMERA
The second of five children, Porter was born into affluence in 1901. Though the family lived in Winnetka, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, the event that was to have, perhaps, the most profound effect on young Eliot came in 1910, when, for a summer retreat, his father purchased Great Spruce Head Island in Maine's Penobscot Bay.
A year later, Eliot received his first camera. And with the dedication of a young naturalist, he set out to photograph the island's bird life.
As was traditional in the Porter household, Eliot attended Harvard University. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1923, followed by a medical degree in 1929. He tried devoting himself to the life of a biochemist, but the call of the wild, and his growing passion for photography, was too strong.
Then came the dinner invitation that would change his life. The year was 1934. The place was Boston.
"Porter was invited to a dinner party and told to bring his photographs," said Martineau. "He was told there was going to be another photographer there who was going to show his work. But he didn't know who it was.
"Porter showed his work first. Then Ansel Adams showed his," Martineau continued. "When Adams brought out his pictures, Porter wanted to disappear because they were so far superior to what he was doing. He wrote that he had never seen such amazing pictures, which included some of Adams' close-ups of roots and ferns and rocks."
Charged with new dedication, the first thing Porter did was change his photographic format to the larger 4-inch-by-5-inch camera. He also began to experiment with the new strobe-light technology for stop-action photography developed by Harold Edgerton in 1931.
The combination, along with a great deal of patience, led to Porter's first truly successful bird studies.
Porter's dedication was incredible, Martineau said.
"He would listen for bird calls, then locate the nests," he said. "He would observe the birds for weeks until the eggs had hatched. Then he would count the days until he felt it was safe to approach the nest. He would build a wooden platform next to the tree that could hold his camera, his tripod, his lights, which were powered by a small generator and battery packs.
"He might wait from 8 in the morning until sunset for just the right moment to shoot. He would trim back branches that were in his way, insert a black card behind the nest to accentuate the foreground, and if a bird was too shy, he would put material in the nest so it couldn't hide."
ADVANCES IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Just as the 4-by-5 camera and the stroboscope changed the technique of Porter's photographs, the introduction of Kodachrome film and the development of the dye-transfer printing process changed their look.
Initially conceived for the film industry, Kodachrome offered a transparency film that produced deep, saturated colors. Porter would use it to full advantage.
He began to produce stunning landscapes that used Kodachrome as their base material. Then came the prints.
"Dye-transfer printing is an amazingly complex process," Martineau said. "It's known for its stability and the richness of its colors. It's been estimated that if properly preserved, a dye-transfer print may last as long as 300 years."
It's a nonphotographic additive color process that produces superbly rich prints. And Porter became a master printer.
GAINING RECOGNITION
Porter's first significant breakthrough as a photographer came in 1938 when Alfred Stieglitz offered him a one-person show at his prestigious New York gallery, An American Place. The show featured Porter's early black-and-white images.
Soon he made the leap to color. Unfortunately, "serious" art photographers tended to disdain Porter's color work, equating color photography with commercialism.
His photography of birds received its first artistic recognition in 1943, when photohistorian Nancy Newhall included 53 of Porter's studies in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Then, in 1961, Porter had the breakthrough that catapulted his photographs into the public eye. It was the culmination of a project that had begun a decade before, when his wife said his color landscapes, mostly of Maine, reminded her of the writings of Thoreau.
Porter took the comparison to heart, and began to produce a body of work that mirrored Thoreau's writing. According to Martineau, Porter would often carry the great naturalist author's books with him while he worked.
Newhall put Porter in contact with the Sierra Club's David Brauer. Together they produced the conservationist group's first all-color coffee-table book, "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World," set to texts by Thoreau.
The impact of this beautifully produced book was monumental, and it launched a series of Sierra Club editions that featured Porter's photographs - of Glen Canyon in Southern Utah, prior to its flooding by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, the High Sierras and beyond.
The Getty's exhibition showcases all aspects of Porter's photographic work.
There are the early black-and-white images of Penobscot Bay, his Audubon-inspired bird studies and his sumptuous dye-transfer color prints of radiantly glowing trees, golden shimmering rivers, russet red canyon walls and branches upon branches upon branches.
