Personal Background: Eliot Porter was born December 6, 1901 in Winnetka, IL. He got into photography at an early age, taking pictures of birds at his childhood island property in Maine. In 1924 he graduated from Harvard with a BS in chemical engineering, and he went back to get an MD from Harvard medical school, which he graduated from in 1929. He taught biochemistry there until 1939, when he quit to pursue photography. Alfred Stieglitz, another photographer, was the first person to put Porter’s bird photography in a show and ultimately get him off the ground in the photography world. Eventually he switched from black and white bird photos to color photos of nature in general. During his career, he published many collections of his nature photos. He died on November 2, 1990 in Santa Fe, NM.
Style: Porter’s style of photographing birds was very different to his style of photographing plants and nature. His bird photos have been described as “meticulous” and “fine”, and have been compared to John James Audubon’s drawings. They were very detail-oriented and made good use of the subtle textures in the birds’ feathers to create really compelling photographs.In his photos of nature, he really used the color film to his advantage. All his nature photos had bright, complementary colors and make the forests and flowers seem so much more interesting and exciting than they do normally. Philosophy: Porter was an adamant environmentalist. Most of his published collections were dedicated to raising awareness of the environment and its condition. He travelled around the world taking pictures, and wrote about habitat destruction, pollution, and more. In addition to environmentalism, he had his own personal reason for taking his photos the way he did. He once said that he wanted to try and make visual recreations of some of author Henry David Thoreau’s passages.
Influences: I really like the bright colors and contrast he uses. The composition is really creative too and captures the subject in a new way. I try to capture these things in my own photos, especially with the colors. I feel like appealing colors can make any photo look good
Eliot Porter, untitled
flower bush
Overall I think these two photos are really similar. The placement of the 4 flowers are essentially the same, and I tried to edit the colors to be as close as possible. The differences are, obviously, that my photo has way more leaves (and flowers) in it, because my flowers came from a bush and his just grew directly from the ground. Also, the ground is a lot lighter in my photo. But like I said, overall, they look pretty similar and I'm happy with it.
Eliot Porter, untitled
swamp grass
I tried really hard to find grass that was the same color and position as the grass in Porter's photo, but I just couldn't. I found grass tall enough that looked enough like his though, and I think it turned out... okay. Obviously there are differences in color and placing, but after a bit of editing and canvas flipping I think I got it close enough.
Eliot Porter, Grass and Ferns
trespassing on my own property
It's practically impossible to find groups of plants exactly the same as in a photo. I couldn't get the grass or the other plants, but I did have ferns. I had to walk around in the middle of them for a while before finding a composition that vaguely resembled the one in the photo. So, obviously, there's a lot of major differences here- but somehow, I feel like with the composition, it's a lot similar.
I had a lot of difficulty with this project. It took me forever to even find a photographer who both had enough information on them to write about, and who had photos I could reasonably recreate. Even when I did, I picked like 10 possible photos and tried to get at recreating all of them to see which ones I could get closest to- which involved going to lots of parks lots of times and taking a ton of photos. Eventually though, I managed to recreate these three pretty well. Overall I'm really happy with how this project turned out and I'm glad I managed to get it done.