Eliot porter: The American photographer with a love of all things natural and colorful.

 

Born in 1901, Porter grew up in a world where color photography was a topic of the future; far fetched and unobtainable. Yet, even as a child, Eliot Porter was fascinated with color and capturing it. All throughout his childhood, Porter would take a small Kodak box camera and take black and white photos of the birds native to his family's summer home in Maine. This fascination with photography followed Porter all the way through his early education and through college, yet, he never saw his own potential and only saw the craft as a hobby. That was until a friend and colleague, Ansel Adams, encouraged Porter to not only shoot with a more advanced camera but to pursue photography as a career. At this point in his life, Porter had graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemical engineering and a Doctorate of Medicine, and had remained at Harvard to be a medical researcher. And so, with the encouragement of Adams, Porter submitted his work to an American Place in 1939 and was featured. This not only gave Porter a platform to launch off of but it gave him the inspiration needed to pursue photography. At first, he specialized in landscape photography around the United States. Traveling from his home state of Illinois in the 1950’s to Mexico to capture the little documented and colorful culture of Central America. Since color photography was such a new concept, Porter’s work was almost revolutionary. With bright colors and even more vibrant contrast, his work is eye-catching and eerily reminiscent of early American landscape paintings with how ethereal the images are. Throughout his career, Porter traveled to Glen Canyon, Adirondack Park, Baja California, the Galapágos Islands, Greece, Turkey, the Grand Canyon, Appalachia, Africa, Iceland, Antarctica, and China. With all of these beautiful and diverse countries and locations to shoot, as well as his phenomenal quality of work, Porter eventually won “the Conservation Award from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Gold Medal of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and honorary doctorates from Colby College, the University of Albuquerque, and Dickinson College.”  Eliot Porter passed away on November 2nd, 1990 with a legacy of phenomenal photography, immense attention to detail, and of course a love for color. Ansel Adams once said that Porter was “Nature’s Master of Color” and I couldn’t agree more. 





(Pool in a brook. Pond Brook, near Whiteface, New Hampshire, October 1953)


Sources:

ICP: Eliot Porter | International Center of Photography 

FINANCIAL TIMES: https://www.ft.com/content/a1d2c20c-21aa-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96

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