Untitled
Eliot Porter
Created : n.d.
Donated : 1996
Medium : Photography
Dimensions: 8 inx10 in
Located: 2nd Floor,North Hallway
Eliot Furness Porter was born in Winnetka, Illinois in 1901. He was about six or eight years old when he started taking pictures with a box Brownie camera, but he did not take up the camera as a career until the middle of his life. He was almost 40, teaching biochemistry and bacteriology at Harvard when he gave up that career for photography. Porter loved birds and used painstaking efforts to photograph them in flight with the relatively unsophisticated cameras and films then available. He hoped that a book of the bird photographs could be published but was told that color was essential in order to identify the birds by their plumage. He taught himself the latest technique of color photography and was the first major photographer to use color for nature photography. Porter traveled widely and published 26 books of color photographs from those travels. In 1941, Porter was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph birds. It was renewed in 1946, the same year he moved to Santa Fe. He died in Santa Fe on November 2, 1990.
