Category: Wilderness

Originally trained as a chemical engineer before receiving his medical degree from Harvard University, Eliot Porter turned away from his career as a biomedical researcher to practice photography. Encouraged by Alfred Stieglitz with an exhibition at An American Place in 1938, Porter honed his skills first as a bird photographer and then as an interpreter of the natural world. At a time when black and white photography was the norm for artistic work, and color was denigrated as a glitzy commercial medium, Porter honed his skills as a color practitioner, mastering the difficult dye transfer printing process. In 1962 his commitment to color photography was validated when the Sierra Club published the hugely popular book, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, a ground-breaking publication in the history of environmental photography. Unlike his contemporary, Ansel Adams, who specialized in grand, operatic views of distant landscapes, Porter trained his eye to see pattern and meaning in the small details of nature.

Scroll down to watch and listen as Professor Kirsten Hoving, guest curator of Land and Lens, and Professor John Elder share their thoughts on Porter’s work:

Although this photograph did not appear in the Sierra Club book, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, published in 1962, Porter chose to include it in a portfolio of ten dye transfer prints called In Wildness. The portfolio was produced in 1981 by Daniel Wolf Press, Inc., with prints made by the New York lab of Berkey K&L and approved by Porter. Of the seven prints that featured New England subjects, only three appeared in the original Sierra Club book, although one was a variant of a published image. Three other prints were subjects in Maine, while the remaining three featured photographs taken in Colorado, California, and Arizona.

While moving away from the New England imagery of the original Sierra Club book, Sculpted Rock, Marble Canyon, Arizona is typical of Porter’s preference for intimate views of the natural world. Closer in subject to his next Sierra Club project, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado, published in 1963, the photograph features rock formations in northern Arizona located near the beginning of the Grand Canyon. Named by John Wesley Powell on his second expedition to map the Colorado River in 1871-72, “marble” canyon is an inaccurate name for the polished limestone rock formations.

Marble Canyon was the site of the proposed Marble Canyon Dam in the 1950s. Vehemently opposed by the Sierra Club, the project was finally abandoned in 1968. Porter may have made this photograph the year before as a form of protest against the building of the dam, whose site was only about 100 miles downstream from Glen Canyon.

When compared to Ansel Adams’ Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, the difference between Porter’s and Adams’ styles is clear. While Adams presents the massive rock face as a grand “earth gesture,” to use his term, Porter invites us to examine intimate, human-scaled details in nature. Adams’ black and white image is a study in bold contrasts, while Porter’s delicately colored print emphasizes the soft colors and rounded shapes of the canyon rocks.

Stereography was an early form of three-dimensional photography. Two nearly identical images were placed side-by-side on cardboard. When viewed through a special viewer, the two images would merge into one with the illusion of three-dimensionality. Today this can also be achieved through animation, as seen in the video below.

Stereographs became wildly popular during the second half of the nineteenth century. Affordable to everyone, they reached across class lines. By displaying views of far-away or inaccessible places, stereographs enabled viewers to learn about the world by imagining being there. Many nineteenth-century photographers who worked in the West produced large numbers of stereographs to support themselves, including Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge.

The red osier, also known as the red willow, redstem dogwood, and creek dogwood, is a tall deciduous shrub found throughout northern and western North America. Eliot Porter’s Red Osier, Near Great Barrington, Massachusetts appeared in the Sierra Club book, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, first published in 1962 to mark the centenary of the death of Henry David Thoreau.

Porter’s approach to illustrating Thoreau was to focus on the seasons. When published in the Sierra Club book, the red osier photograph appeared in the section devoted to spring, opposite this quotation from Thoreau’s journal that demonstrates the writer’s meticulous observation of nature:

March 17, 1859

When I am opposite the end of the willow-row, seeing the osiers of perhaps two years old all in a mess, they are seen to be very distinctly yellowish beneath and scarlet above. They are fifty rods off. Here is the same chemistry that colors the leaf or fruit, coloring the bark. It is generally, perhaps always, the upper part of the twig, the more recent growth, that is the higher-colored and more flower or fruit like. So leaves are more ethereal the higher up and farther from the root. In the bark of the twigs, indeed, is the more permanent flower or fruit. The flower falls in spring or summer, the fruit and leaves fall or wither in autumn, but the blushing twigs retain their color throughout the winter and appear more brilliant than ever the succeeding spring. They are winter fruit.

In 1927, Ansel Adams was hard at work on photographs for his Parmelian Print series. He was determined to make an image of Half Dome, a massive granite formation rising half a mile from the valley floor. He wanted to photograph it from a rock slab nicknamed “The Diving Board,” which hung out 3500 feet above the valley and offered an unsurpassed view of Half Dome’s huge Western face.

With four friends on an April day, Adams began the rigorous hours-long hike—he called it a “scramble”—to the Diving Board, making their way across slippery trails. The rest of the group relied on their hiking shoes for traction. Adams wore black basketball sneakers.[footnote]Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams, A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), p. 57.[/footnote] He carried a 40-pound backpack with his bulky 6 ½ x 8 /12 Korona view camera, several lenses and filters, and a dozen glass negatives. He strapped a heavy wooden tripod to his backpack. He was 25 years old, six feet tall, and weighed only 125 pounds.[footnote]Ansel Adams, Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1983), p. 3.[/footnote]

Composition was done on a ground glass background, with the scene viewed upside down. He set up his camera and composed the image, using a yellow filter to slightly darken the sky. The shadow effect seemed right, so he made the exposure.

He later recalled, “As I replaced the slide, I began to think about how the print was to appear, and if it would transmit any of the feeling of the monumental shape before me in terms of its expressive-emotional quality. I began to see in my mind’s eye the finished print I desired: the brooding cliff with a dark sky and the sharp rendition of distant, snowy Tenaya Peak.” He realized that he needed a deep red filter to darken the sky to create the emotional effect he wanted. He exposed his last plate. That night when he developed the plate, he realized he had succeeded. As he wrote, “I had achieved my first true visualization! I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print. The sky had actually been a light, slightly hazy blue and the sunlit areas of Half Dome were moderately dark gray in value. The red filter dramatically darkened the sky and the shadows on the great cliff. Luckily I had with me the filter that made my visualized image possible.”[footnote]Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams, An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985), p. 76.[/footnote]

Today Monolith is considered Adams’ first masterpiece. He was able to achieve it through visualization of the finished print, but also through manipulation of the observed scene. The sky wasn’t dark – it was a nice day. But the mood he wanted to create to match his personal response to the massive rock formation was an emotionally dark one, so he altered the sky accordingly. Now, we can do this with Photoshop, although some people would chastise a photographer for tinkering with reality like this. But for Adams, this manipulation enabled him to create a photograph that went beyond a record to become a statement. People sometimes wonder what Adams would have thought of Photoshop. He probably would would have loved it. As he put it, “the photographer visualizes his conception of the subject as presented in the final print. He achieves the expression of his visualization through his technique—aesthetic, intellectual, and mechanical.”[footnote]Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams, An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985), p. 77-78.[/footnote]

In July 1861, San Francisco photographer Carleton Watkins  made the first of many trips to remote Yosemite Valley with a mammoth plate camera, equipped for 18 x 22 inch glass plate negatives, and a stereoscopic camera. He returned with thirty mammoth plates and around a hundred stereograph negatives. By 1863, Watkins was selling stereographs of Yosemite, as well as other sites of interest around San Francisco. In June 1864, his stunning photographs of Yosemite’s peaks and valleys were instrumental in helping to convince President Abraham Lincoln and the 38^th U.S. Congress to pass the Yosemite Valley Grant Act, which preserved the land for public use and set the pattern for the National Park System that would follow.

In 1871 Watkins moved to larger quarters in San Francisco and opened his Yosemite Art Gallery. There he displayed mammoth plate photographs and more than a thousand stereographs. Stereographs printed with Watkins’ 22-26 Montgomery Street address date from the period between Watkins’ move to larger quarters in 1871 and the loss of his gallery and negatives due to financial pressures in 1875.

The mountains and waterfalls of Yosemite were favorite subjects for Watkins’ cameras. His earliest views of waterfalls, like this one, focused on the falls themselves. When he returned in 1864 and 1865 to make photographs for the California State Geological Survey, he used a new wide-angle lens to provide broader views from a more distant location.

Watkins made a number of photographs of the massive sequoia trees of the Mariposa Grove. The figure on horseback posing here may be Galen Clark, one of the first white settlers in Yosemite and the caretaker of the trees. Back East, viewers were amazed by photographic documents of the enormous trees. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that Watkins’ photographs of the tree known as the Grizzly Giant “made the trees possible.”

Early visitors to Yosemite envisioned the massive geological features in religious terms. By naming a towering granite face Cathedral Rock, a direct association was drawn between the medieval cathedrals of Europe and the natural cathedrals of the New World. Like Ansel Adams’ photograph of Lower Paradise Valley, the notion that the divine could be found within the beauties of nature is evident in the anglicized names of Yosemite sites that replaced Native American ones.

Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge), is best known for his photographic motion studies, which eventually led to the development of cinema technology. Less recognized is his landscape photography, including his first photographic project, undertaken in the Yosemite Valley area in 1867. Trekking the Valley with a team of assistants and pack mules, Muybridge used the cumbersome wet-plate collodion process, which required a portable dark-tent where glass negatives could be sensitized then developed while wet, as well as cameras large enough to accommodate the glass plates. A selection of these photographs was sold as a series of 260 images whose popularity launched Muybridge’s career.

Muybridge visited Yosemite for another six-month trip in 1872, making large and small-plate photographs that earned him international renown. At a time when the frontier was being transformed by farming, mining, and a rapidly growing population, images of unspoiled, majestic natural scenes struck a chord. For this serene view of Loya, the Ahwahneechee name for the geological feature anglicized as Sentinel Rock, Muybridge chose a viewpoint that emphasized the mirror surface of the Merced River, seemingly frozen by the long exposure required by the wet-plate collodion process. Loya, or Sentinel Rock, is a hazy feature in the background, rising into a sky made cloudless by the wet-plate collodion process’s over-sensitivity to blue light.

Muybridge’s composition, which zooms from the foreground into deep space, may have been informed by his familiarity with stereograph technology. During the late 1860s and 1870s, Muybridge published many stereo views of the Yosemite Valley. Small paired photographs mounted to a card meant to be viewed in a special viewer that would produce the illusion of three-dimensionality in a single image, stereographs required a clear demarcation of space, especially a well-defined foreground and a progression into deep space. Many photographers who made stereographs also applied these compositional elements to their larger view photographs.