Eliot Porter ' COLOR' On Exhibit at Hasted Hunt

Saturday, 23 September 2006 14:03

New York City - Hasted Hunt is pleased to announce ELIOT PORTER - COLOR, vintage dye transfer landscape photographs, opening October 12, 2006 and running through November 18, 2006.

Eliot Porter (1901-1990) is known as the pioneer of color photography, best celebrated for his landscapes and many publications.  The color dye transfer process developed by the Eastman Kodak Co. is most highly regarded for its longevity and the intensity of the colors, the range from wild reds to intense violets.  Porter’s vintage photographs are distinguished not only for their palette but also by their pictorial handsomeness, with Nature at its most abstract.

First exhibited in 1938 by Alfred Stieglitz at "An American Place" gallery, Porter had a long career spanning more than 50 years.  He established his reputation most dramatically with the publication of In the Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (Sierra Club 1962).  Porter published over 25 books with titles ranging from The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (1963) to Intimate Landscapes (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1979) to his late collaboration with James Gleick, Nature's Chaos (Viking 1990).

The ultimate nature photographer and environmentalist, Porter photographed throughout the US and from Antarctica to Egypt to Iceland.  But in his lifetime he exhibited at both the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History effectively blurring the lines between art and documentation.  His archive is maintained by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

At this time he began to point his camera at the environment around him. His wife, Aline Porter, suggested to him that his work and his connection to the natural world made her think of Thoreau’s writings, and he began a long project putting his images together with Thoreau’s words.  In 1962 The Sierra Club published In Wildness is The Preservation of the World.  The book and Porter’s vision changed our way of seeing the world forever. It was also a shocking revelation for the photography world - it was an art book of color photography.