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Eliot Porter: Coloring the Mood
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23115 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 2003 |
458 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
" The central theme of Eliot Porter's photographs," wrote Weston Naef, former associate curator of prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "is not botany, ornithology, or geology, although an understanding of these bodies of knowledge is useful to appreciate them fully--but the very act of contemplation and the mood sustained by the precise control of color relationships."
While Porter's work embodies the perfection and strength he admired in the photographs of his mentor Ansel Adams, there is something more intimate afoot here. Study the golden stand of grass, the pristine white blanket of snow, the yellow birches atop a rock face, and you feel his intense desire to move us as he was moved by nature. Porter's work examines the individual moment, and with him we experience the piercing beauty of our world, one leaf or snowflake at a time.
A pioneer in the application of the highest technical standards to work that had no commercial intent, Porter, despite his travels to the Galápagos Islands, Africa, Iceland, and Antarctica, among other locales, became a master at taking photographs that have a glorious nonspecificity of place. "A detail," wrote Porter, "is quite capable of eliciting a greater intensity of emotion than the whole scene evoked in the first place ... because the whole of nature is too vast and complex to grasp quickly, but a fragment of it is comprehensible and allows the imagination scope to fill in the excluded setting."
In Porter's early work there was already the tendency to move in close and let the part stand for the whole that would be seen in his mature photographs. His skill as a keen observer of nature was
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