Porter, Eliot, et al.Gala ́pagos: The Flow of Wildness. San
Francisco: Sierra Club, 1968.
Porter, Jonathan.All Under Heaven: The Chinese World.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Porter, Jonathan.Iceland. Boston: Bulfinch Press and Lit-
tle, Brown and Co., 1989.
Gillipsie, Charles.Monuments of Egypt. Albuquerque: Uni-
versity of New Mexico Press, 1990.
Further Reading
Porter, Eliot.Eliot Porter. Boston: Little, Brown and Com-
pany in association with Amon Carter Museum; A New
York Graphics Society Book, 1987.
Porter, Eliot, and Ellen Auerbach. Mexican Churches.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.
Rohrbach, John.The Color of Wildness. Texts by Rebecca
Solnitt and Jonathan Porter. New York: Aperture in
association with Amon Carter Museum, 2001.
Solnitt, Rebecca. ‘‘A Heightened Perception: The Color of
Wildness.’’Apertureno. 164 (Summer 2001): 1–15.
Stegner, Wallace, and Page Stegner. Eliot Porter: American
Places. John Macrae III, ed. New York: Greenwich
House/Crown Publishers, Inc., 1987.PORTRAITURE
No genre flourished in the medium of photography
quite like the portrait. Both photography’s ques-
tioned status as an art form and the portrait’s low
place on academic painting’s hierarchical scale
allowed the portrait photograph to garner tremen-
dous popular appeal. And despite all the innova-
tions that have developed since its inception,
photography has continued to be associated with
representing people. In ‘‘A Short History of Photo-
graphy’’ (1931) Walter Benjamin writes, ‘‘the renun-
ciation of the human image is the most difficult of
all things for photography.’’ Given this affinity for
portraying people, it perhaps is not a coincidence
that photography became associated with demo-
cratic ideals. It has become a truism in the history
of photography that its invention was coincident
with and a part of the lower and middle classes’
rise to cultural and political visibility. Photography
aroused and satisfied the desire for portraits that
were relatively inexpensive and quickly produced,
but still could evoke aristocratic prestige.
Portrait photographs are so central to and em-
bedded in contemporary visual culture they often
go unnoticed. Portrait photographs provide the
visual structure upon which the narrative of identity
is constructed. Yearbook photos, identity cards,
and wedding pictures—these are just a few of the
images that frame the individual in the portrait’s
frame of recognition.
The portrait had a long history as a painted
representation before the advent of photography.
Forms of portraiture existed in antiquity, but the
image many would recognize as a portrait—a life-
like depiction of a person frontally posed to display
the individual’s distinct facial features and distinct
expression—is an inheritance from the European
Renaissance, which celebrated the exemplary indi-
vidual and perfected the depiction of three-dimen-
sional perspective. Portraiture was assumed to be a
mimetic art form based on physical resemblance,
but this did not impede it from becoming a crucial
part of the symbolism that announced and legiti-
mized the European aristocracy. Though the por-
trait photograph clearly borrowed from the painted
portrait’s image repertoire, it also developed its own
visual discourses as photographers experimented
with and discovered the particular qualities of the
photographic medium and rapid technological im-
provements made it an accessible and then unques-
tioned part of daily life.
Historians and theorists of photography in the
late twentieth century have questioned the assump-
tion that the portrait photograph offered unquali-
fied access to a democratic public sphere. In his
essay ‘‘The Body and the Archive’’ (1986), Allan
Sekula acknowledges that photography expanded
the portrait’s ‘‘ceremonial presentation of the bour-
geois self’’ but he also reads the portrait photograph
dialectically, arguing that it operated both ‘‘honor-
ifically and repressively.’’ While portrait photogra-
phy constructed a social archive that reinforced
the importance of possessing and presenting anPORTER, ELIOT