Shoot in the style of:
Eliot Porter
In this project, shoot in the style of, I will be showcasing the life and work of Eliot Porter. Eliot Poter was an American Photographer who was best noted for his detailed and exquisite color images of birds and landscapes.
Eliot Porter was born on December 6, 1901in Winnetka, Illinois. In his early life, Eliot Porter trained as an engineer at Harvard in 1924. He also got his MD at Harvard Medical School in 1929. Porter taught biochemistry at Harvard from 1929 to 1939. This was right around the time that he took his hobby of photographing birds into a career. In 1939 Alfred Stieglitz praised his work and gave him a show at his An American Place gallery.
In the early 1930’s Porters photographs of birds were in black and white, however in the early 1940’s he began using the then new Kodachrome color film, it had slow speed and required the use of large flashbulbs to achieve the correct exposure. Porter used a cumbersome large format camera because he valued the greater detailed the equipment allowed. The lack of mobility of the camera due to its size, Porter would have to spend hours sometimes even days waiting for specific birds to perch near him. His bird photographs where very important because of their meticulous detail while also artistically of note because of their fine technique and composition. His work was in the style of Ansel Adams, showing the subject in a straightforward manner, with emphasis on tone and detail.
Eventually Porter’s color photography went from the portrayal of birds to beautiful natural landscapes. In 1962 he presented an exhibition entitled “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the world”. Porter was active in environmental preservation and had other books published by the Sierra club. He published many books in his lifetime about nature photographs, some of those books include, The Place No One Knew (1963), Baja California (1967), Galapagos (1968), Appalachian Wilderness (1970), and The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972). His finest collection of bird photos was collected in his book, Birds of North America (1972).
In 1979 Eliot Porter’s work was exhibited in Intimate Landscapes, this was first one-person show of color photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This exhibit brought praise to Porter as the one individual who brought credibility to color photography as a medium of fine art. The image selection from this exhibition defined the now known term “Intimate Landscape”. The close range
Quite compositions of natural elements with muted colors and dense textures, meditative and dense with layer meanings. This was the Hallmark of Porter’s work at the exclusion of more expansive and spectacular landscapes.
Porter traveled all over the world to extensively explore and to photograph ecologically important and culturally significant places. In his travels he published books from Glen Canyon in Utah, Maine, Baja California, Galapagos Islands, Antarctica, East Africa, and Iceland. Some of his most noted cultural studies took place in Mexico, Egypt, China, Czechoslovakia, and ancient Greece. The book he had published on Glen Canyon “The Place No One Knew” depicted the canyons appearance before its inundation by the lake Powell reservoir.
In 1987 a book named “Making a New Science” published by James Gleick, Cause Porter to reexamine his work in the context of Chaos theory. In the 1990 both Porter and James Gleick collaborated on a project called Nature’s Chaos. This combined Porter’s photographs with an essay by Gleick. Sadly, Eliot Porter passed away in 1990 at the age of 88, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had left his personal archive to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
In Eliot Porters personal life, he had a brother named Fairfield Porter who was a realist painter and art critic. His brother in-law, Michael W. Straus, was commissioner of the United States Bureau of Reclamation. Eliot Porter’s was married to his first wife Marian Brown, from 1927 until there divorce in 1934. Porter then remarried in 1936 to Aline Kilham, where they both move to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I choose Eliot Porter for this shoot in the style of project because I was really captivated by his work and publishing’s. He had a love for the outdoors just like me. The way that he was able to capture not only bird’s but beautiful landscapes in full color was just amazing for the time. I personally inspire to travel the world some day taking pictures of food, culture, beautiful landscapes, nature, and wildlife. I would love to make a career being a travel photographer and hopefully have great success just like Porter. Who knows maybe one day in the not so distant future I will have some of my greatest work hanging in a art gallery for the whole world to see.
