Eliot Porter

Eliot Furness Porter (born December 6, 1901 in Winnetka , Illinois , † November 2, 1990 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) was an American photographer.

Life

Porter's interest in nature was supported by his family from a young age. As a teenager in Maine, he began photographing his family's island properties before studying chemical engineering at Harvard University . He then did his doctorate and lectured there, also in the field of biochemistry .

After graduating in the mid-1930s, Eliot's brother, the painter Fairfield Porter, encouraged his interest in photography and introduced him to Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz , who recognized his talent and hired him for a photo exhibition in 1939. For the first time in 1941 and again in 1946, when Porter switched to the radiation laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he received a Guggenheim grant for a photo project, and in 1971 he was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science .

From 1946 he lived in Santa Fe, where he died in 1990.

plant

Eliot Porter became known for his nature and landscape photography. As a boy, he began to be interested in nature and to photograph birds. His passion for structures and patterns, for the irregular and chaotic, as well as the fractal structures in nature, he put into practice. While his first works were often black and white, color later began to become very important to him.

Among his sponsors was Beaumont Newhall , who was already head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art when they met in 1938 . In later years the inventor H. Edgerton , who himself became known as a photographer, built a stroboscopic flash for Eliot Porter so that he could capture birds in different phases of flight. Eliot Porter also took photos while traveling in Iceland and Greece , on the Galápagos Islands and in Antarctica . The pictures of the Grand Canyon , which he has visited again and again for decades, are among the classics of American landscape photography .

literature

• In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World , 1962 (pictures from the exhibition "The Seasons")
• Intimate Landscapes ( MoMA retrospective )
• American Places , New York 1983
• Iceland , London 1989 (pictures from a trip from 1972)
• Nature's Chaos , Penguin Books 1990, ISBN 0-670-83532-3
• The Grand Canyon , Munich 1992, ISBN 3-7913-1233-2
• Vanishing Songbirds , New York 1996 (from the estate)

Web links

• Literature by and about Eliot Porter in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eliot Porter. January 31, 2018, accessed May 30, 2019 . 
2. ^ University of Wyoming | Art Museum | The West of Eliot Porter: Images of Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. Retrieved May 30, 2019 .