suburbs of Chicago. He was the second of the five
children of James Foster Porter, an architect and
biologist, and Ruth Wadsworth Furness Porter, a
social activist. Porter’s love of nature was fostered
at an early age by family trips and summers spent
on their island in Maine, Great Spruce Head. His
father’s interest in probing aspects of the natural
world in addition to an influential high school
teacher led Porter to pursue a bachelor’s degree in
chemical engineering and an M.D. from Harvard
Medical School. Porter explained that, ‘‘about this
time I developed a capacity for observation that
has lasted all my life’’ (Porter 1987, 22–23). From
1929 to 1939, Porter researched and taught bacter-
iology and biophysics at Harvard and then at age
33 abandoned his scientific career to follow his
passion for photography.
Porter had begun photographing around age 10
and received his first camera, a Brownie, as a
Christmas gift from his parents. He soon advanced
to a Kodak with a faster shutter speed and even-
tually to a Graflex single-lens reflex. He and a
boyhood friend photographed all kinds of birds
on Great Spruce Head Island assisted by a canvas
blind that Porter’s mother helped them construct.
He was in his late 20s when a colleague introduced
him to the expanded capabilities of the 35 mm
Leica camera with a shutter speed of 1/1000 sec-
ond, and he promptly purchased a Leica for him-
self. The next significant acquisition was a view
camera after seeing Ansel Adams’sFrozen Lake
and Cliffs, The Sierra Nevada, Sequoia National
Park, California(1932). He met Adams at a dinner
party and proudly showed his work. Porter relates,
‘‘That was a traumatic and embarrassing experi-
ence; I saw immediately how vastly superior his
photographs were to mine, and how little I know
about photography technically, or what its poten-
tial was for creative expression (Porter 1987, 27).
At Adams’s suggestion, Porter purchased a lar-
ger format 912-cm Linhof. This was a life-chan-
ging experience, although not as significant as his
1938 meeting with Alfred Stieglitz.
Porter had shown his photographs to Stieglitz on
a number of occasions, originally at the suggestion
of his younger brother Fairfield Porter, a well-
known realist painter living in New York. Stieglitz
consistently commented that he must work harder.
Finally, on his fourth visit, Stieglitz announced that
he wanted to show Porter’s pictures of Switzerland,
Austria, and Maine in his already legendary gal-
lery, An American Place. In addition to the great
honor of being only the third photographer he
showed in the gallery (after Adams and Paul
Strand), Stieglitz paid Porter a very high compli-
ment: ‘‘Some of your photographs are the first I
have ever seen which make me feel: ‘There is my
own spirit.’ Quite an unbelievable experience for
one like myself’’ (Letter dated January 21, 1939).
The following year, due to his frustration with
research and the realization of his artistic potential,
Porter became a photographer full time.
His ongoing passion for photographing birds led
Porter to break new ground in color photography
in the 1940s. His first advancement with bird
photography was to independently develop a sys-
tem that synchronized the flash and the shutter to
achieve higher quality photographs. When he
approached Paul Brooks, editor-in-chief at
Houghton Mifflin, about the possibility of publish-
ing a book of these photos, Brooks stated that the
images would need to be in color. Such a project
presented significant technical challenges: the
slower speed of color film, the more complicated
printing process, and almost prohibitive cost of
color publishing. Although he did not publish a
book on birds until 1953, this continuing project
sparked his zeal for color photography.
Porter in fact had a hand in the development of the
popular film Kodachrome, which featured highly
saturated, bright colors and became extremely popu-
lar with amateur photographers after its introduction
by Kodak in 1936. He worked with the inventors to
shoot test materials; he later also worked with Kodak
scientists to test and perfect, and in 1946, developed
the Ektachrome emulsion. A transparency or positive
film, Ektachrome was highly compatible with the dye
transfer process. The introduction of Kodachrome
sheet film in 1938 expanded the opportunities for
working photographers. Early on, many artistic
photographers seemed excited about the possibilities
of color, but later their reactions ranged from tepid to
scathing; Kodachrome’s highly saturated colors and
tilt toward accentuated reds was felt to be too com-
mercial, or appropriate only to the amateur. Stieglitz,
for one, decided not to give Porter a second show
because he felt his color bird photographs did not
fulfill his artistic potential.
Ansel Adams also voiced considerable disap-
proval with the medium. Adams’ opinion as regards
to color might have been related to the limited suc-
cess he was able to achieve compared to his black-
and-white work or to the rivalry caused by the
increasing popularity of Porter’s work in color
(Rohrbach 2001, 99 and 102). Even so, the schism
between the mediums became significant, with color
often seen as less expressive and artistic and black-
and-white as noble and eternal.
Meticulous in his process, Porter always strove to
capture the natural color of the scene in his finalPORTER, ELIOT