Eliot Porter - A Profile

REBEL GENIUS, RELENTLESS PERFECTIONIST... Eliot Porter at 85

Would you like to be a famous writer photographer roaming around in the scenic out-of-doors, one whose work is sought by eager publishers and collectors alike? How about becoming a worldclass naturalist and artist? Or, perhaps, combining all of the above into a tidy livelihood as an utterly independent businessman?

Then be a rebel, like Eliot Porter. He has achieved success in all of those endeavors, even making it look easy. Ironically, however, easy is one thing Porter's life emphatically is not. The man he works for is far too stern a taskmaster for that. The taskmaster is Porter himself, who insists on doing only what he wants to do in the way of assignments, when and where and how he chooses to do them, and always performing to a standard that remains unwavering: only excellence will suffice.

That kind of working arrangement does simplify life a good deal. If it makes Porter sound like a bit of a maverick, that is precisely what he is: a comfortably dressed, polite outdoorsman, soft-spoken, somewhat on the shy side, a trifle prickly if prodded, a loner who knows exactly who he is and what he thinks, and who at eighty-five isn't willing to suffer fools at all, let alone gladly.

Eighty-five! It's impossible to imagine Eliot Porter is eighty-five, this man who is still going like sixty producing books and pictures as steadily as ever. "Eliot's mother said he should have been a lighthouse keeper," says his wife, Aline, a painter and sculptor who seldom bothers to accompany her globe-trotting husband on his expeditions to places like Antarctica or the Galapagos Islands, or even to the woods near their New Mexico home. When Eliot Porter is working, says Aline, he is so absorbed that "you might as well not be there."

That capacity for single-minded concentration on nature has enabled Porter to produce more than fifteen books-including epic works on China, Antarctica, Appalachia, North American birds, and the Southwest-from his trove of thou sands of images. The New York Times has called him "the Ansel Adams of color photography," and the Metropolitan Museum of Art granted him a one-man exhib it in 1979 as the "preeminent pioneer and innovator who first gave credibility to color photography as a fine art medium."

Porter's accomplishments are all the more remarkable in light of the fact that until he was almost forty, he was frittering away his time studying chemistry at Harvard, going on for a medical degree there, then spending ten years teaching microbiology at the university's medical school. A man whose family's real estate wealth might have permitted him not to work at all, Porter has in effect triumphed over advantage, working terribly hard all his life. He is out there every morning at the desk he handcrafted himself, working on his autobiography in the office he designed and built with his own hands. As for his photography, he makes his own color prints by the dye transfer method he taught himself, then frames them himself, drives them to the post office himselfand would be irked to be told that anyone might consider those facts remarkable. Porter's is, in fact, a do-it-yourself life, custom-built to suit only Eliot Porter and family.

Eliot Furness Porter was born in Winnetka, Illinois, and as a child found some of his happiest moments prowling the woods near his home and exploring the island his father bought as a family retreat off the coast of Maine. He recalled those days in a formal explanation he delivered to his fellow medical students, after he made the painful decision to abandon their profession: "I found all living things a source of delight," Porter said. "This was not an expressible or even a comprehensible feeling. I was simply tremendously attracted by them. I still remember clearly some of the small objects of nature I found outdoors: tiny potato-like tubers that I dug out of the ground in the woods behind our house; orange and black spiders sitting on silken ladders in their webs; sticky hickory buds in the spring." He did not think of them as beautiful, Porter said, or as wondrous phenomena of nature. He took them for granted. And he loved them.

The hook of the outdoors was sunk deep, and it would stand against the pressures of school and social prestige. In high school, Porter became deeply interested in chemistry (once trying and fortunately failing to manufacture nitroglycerine in his bedroom). He majored in chemistry at Harvard, then decided his future in the field was too limited. "I could work in a soap factory," he lamented. So he decided to press on, studying the chemistry of biological functions An Illinoisan by birth and a chemist and physician by education, Porter was almost 40 before be found his niche in photography, the arts, and nature. JOAN NEARY at medical school. There he came under the influence of the great microbiologist Hans Zinsser, who became his mentor and encouraged Porter to make the laboratory his life's work. Much as he revered Zinsser, Porter soon realized that his professor believed “a dedicated researcher would lose himself in his work so completely that sooner or later he would have to be rescued by his colleagues from starvation or nervous collapse.” Try as he might, Porter could manage neither-nor could he seem to come up with the great discoveries Zinsser expected of him.

Profuse hedgehog cactus blossoms, Turkey Park, Chiricahua Mountains.

His research career aground, a first marriage ending in divorce, Porter found himself sneaking off for solace into the woods with a companion he had first become fond of before he turned twelve: his camera. His first had been a Kodak box camera, and Porter had used it to photograph osprey at the family island.

Unhappy with the limitations of those pictures, he had obtained a folding camera that could capture images at 1/200 of a second. With it, he had won a prize from Kodak when he was sixteen for a picture of a fish hawk.

Now he again became serious about his camera work. Encouraging Porter in his photography was a talented, pretty Boston painter, Aline Kilham, whose best friend happened to be Hans Zinsser's daughter.

Another painter, Eliot's brother, Fairfield Porter, urged him to show his pictures to Alfred Stieglitz, a preeminent figure in the art photography world. Stieglitz told Porter his work was “all woolly.” Get a bigger camera, he suggested. That's what Ansel Adams suggested, too. So Porter put aside his Leica, acquired a 9 by 12-centimeter Linhof, and went back into the field. The next time he showed Stieglitz some pictures, the result was an invitation to show them at Stieglitz's prestigious gallery, An American Place.

Porter's life changed forever. “I realized I was disappointing people. The upheaval was painful. My parents thought it was an unfortunate decision, to say the least,” Porter says. “My mother was very disturbed and went to see Stieglitz! People said, “This is trivial! This is kid stuff!' They thought I was a dilettante. But damned if I wasn't going to do it!” Porter and Aline Kilham were married in 1936 and moved to New Mexico in 1946. Not long afterward, Porter's new career received an important infusion of support, a Guggenheim Fellowship to do bird photography in Arizona. It was a heartening recognition. Porter had not simply turned his back on family tradition and Harvard and medicine. He had ventured off into a solitary vocation that had scant recognition in the art world. Black and white photography was scarcely approved by museum curators; color was even less respectable, looked upon as too jazzy, too ephemeral. Not only did Porter have to pioneer the use of remote flash, experimenting with bulky strobes, and have to teach himself color printing, in order to do the pictures he saw in his mind's eye; he then had to set about convincing a skeptical publishing world that there was a market for the results.

All along, throughout the long struggle, there has been one imperative: the sheer fun of it. Standing in a swamp in New Mexico, Porter shrugged off a question about what kind of grass surrounded him. “I like the color,” he said. “The color is the only thing I'm really concerned aboutthat and the pattern. That's all. I'm not a bird-watcher. I don't keep a life list of the birds I've seen, or anything like that. There is an esthetic purpose, no social purpose. I take pictures because I'm interested in photography. It's the satisfaction of photography itself. I take pleasure from it.”

Selected Reading

Arizona Birds in Color, by Eliot Porter. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1964.

Eliot Porter's Southwest, by Eliot Porter. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1985.

Baja California and the Geography of Hope, photography by Eliot Porter, text by Joseph Wood Krutch. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1967.