Eliot Porter: All the Wild Places

Talk by Farnsworth Curator Jane Bianco

Among America’s foremost twentieth-century photographers, Eliot Furness Porter (1901–1990) is celebrated for his role in establishing color photography as an important art form. The Farnsworth collection includes about fifty of his images, many shot in Maine. Porter is known for his bird photographs made over his lifetime, and for his color photographs whose subjects span the globe and reveal nature’s wondrous configurations of layer and pattern.

In travels between New England and the Southwest, the Baja Peninsula, Iceland, Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, and Africa, he focused increasingly on nature’s details within a changing landscape. Porter was unabashed in his love for his subject matter, and his photography was interwoven with his approach as a naturalist as he grew to become an advocate for protection of the environment. Whether photographed from ground level in close-up or outward with great depth of field, Porter’s multifaceted perspectives, published first in a series of Sierra Club books, helped launch global interest in the conservation movement beginning in the mid-twentieth century.
Cost: $15; $10 museum members, including gallery admission