LOS ANGELES, CA.- Eliot Porter (American, 1901–1990) promoted the use of color in landscape photography beginning in the early 1940s, and in doing so, redirected the history of the genre. Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature, at the Getty Center, through September 17, 2006 examines Porter’s exploration of color as he searched for new ways to present the natural world, pushing beyond black-and-white photography as the sole standard for art. His ability to balance pure form and color resulted in images of enduring visual interest that have not only influenced the course of photography, but also played a key role in the country’s conservation movement.

Over a career of 50 years, Porter traveled extensively to experience nature first-hand and to document its unwavering beauty. The exhibition features over 75 photographs from the 1930s to the 1980s of landscapes and birds in 14 states across the United States, Mexico, and Iceland. Many are from the 1960s, Porter’s most influential period.

“Wilderness must be preserved,” Porter once said. “It is a spiritual necessity. Even though few may visit wilderness areas, they remain an open back door, a safety valve for those who never enter them.” Through his association with the Sierra Club, Porter saw that the camera could be used as an instrument for persuasion, without compromising his artistic goals. This realization transformed him from a passive, theoretical conservationist into an impassioned one.

Porter’s early efforts in black-and-white photography are also represented. Notable among these is a 1938 photograph of the sun setting over Penobscot Bay in Maine that was featured in Porter’s first, watershed solo exhibition, held that year at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in New York. Stieglitz had also bestowed this honor on two other photographers: Paul Strand and Ansel Adams. The show identified Porter as one of the promising photographic artists of his day, persuading the Harvard-educated doctor to leave his work as a bacteriologist and an academic, and devote himself fully to his art. The following year, Porter began using color transparency film and experimenting with the demanding multi-step process for making color prints.

Color photography became his preferred medium of expression long before his contemporaries accepted it, thus beginning a 30-year struggle against the notion that color photographic materials were inferior for artists. Porter—who was able to produce highly controlled prints by altering the brilliance, contrast, or saturation of colors found in the transparency—felt his full-spectrum color work could reveal “a new dimension in the perception and representation of nature in photography.”

One of his main goals was to revolutionize the quality of bird photography, a childhood passion, and elevate it into an art form. To do that, Porter developed a strategic system for photographing birds in the wild that sometimes included the construction of a high wooden tower next to a tree so that he could view a nest without disturbing it. He used a tripod-mounted camera designed to expose sheets of film four-by-five inches in size. Powerful strobe lamps lighted the scene, one on either side of the camera, synchronized to the shutter. This new lighting system, which required a generator and heavy battery packs to operate, enabled him to use a high-speed shutter and the smallest lens aperture, which could stop the movement of small, swift birds and capture them in sharp focus. Porter was recognized for his pioneering studies of birds in the early 1940s with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Porter shared his vision by publishing his works. He has 25 monographs to his name. At times, Porter would pair his images with the inspirational writings of authors such as Henry David Thoreau to convey his emotional response to nature. Some of his most important books stem from a fruitful partnership with the Sierra Club that began in the 1960s. They include In Wildness is the Preservation of the World (1962), which gave the Sierra Club an international reputation as a publisher of fine books, and The Place No One Knew, Glen Canyon on the Colorado (1963), which provoked a Federal review of all reclamation projects on Western rivers and the passage of the Wilderness Act, which had been languishing in Congress since 1956.

Porter’s dream to have his own book of bird photographs was realized in 1972 with the publication of Birds of North America: a Personal Selection. Summing up his life’s work, Porter selected his favorite images from an archive of that covered 252 species and would number more than 8,000 negatives by the time of his death.

Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature has been inspired by the gift of sixty-eight of Porter photographs to the J. Paul Getty Museum by Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. The exhibition also features loans from Janet Russek and Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Solomon, as well as from the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, which lent 34 prints from the Eliot Porter archive. Curator of the exhibition at the Getty is Paul Martineau, Assistant Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum.