Career
Around 1930 he was introduced to Ansel Adams by a friend of the family and to Alfred Stieglitz by his brother Fairfield Porter. Stieglitz continued to critique Porter’s black and white work, now taken with a small Linhof view camera. In 1938, Stieglitz showed Porter's work in his New York City gallery. The exhibit's success prompted Porter to leave Harvard and pursue photography full-time. In the 1940s, he began working in color with Eastman Kodak's new dye transfer process, a technique Porter would use his entire career.
Porter's reputation increased following the publication of his 1962 book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World. Published by the Sierra Club, the book featured Porter's color nature studies of the New England woods and quotes by Henry David Thoreau. A best-seller, several editions of the book have been printed. Porter served as a director of the Sierra Club from 1965 to 1971. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.
Porter traveled extensively to photograph ecologically important and culturally significant places. He published books of photographs from Glen Canyon in Utah, Maine, Baja California, Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, East Africa, and Iceland. His cultural studies included Mexico, Egypt, China, Czechoslovakia, and ancient Greek sites.
James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) caused Porter to reexamine his work in the context of chaos theory. They collaborated on a project published in 1990 as Nature's Chaos, which combined his photographs with a new essay by Gleick. Porter died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1990 and bequeathed his personal archive to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
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