When his first book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, appeared in November 1962, it came as a revelation. Nothing like it had been seen before, and though the subject was ancient, the technology that allowed him to represent it so dazzlingly was new. Porter was one of the pioneers of color photography, and his editor, Sierra Club executive director David Brower, enlisted new printing technology to attain an unprecedented level of color fidelity and sharpness of reproduction. The essayist Guy Davenport wrote that the book “cannot be categorized: it is so distinguished among books of photography, among anthologies, among art books, that its transcendence is superlative.” A later reviewer recalled, “A kind of revolution was under way, for with the publication of this supremely well-crafted book, conservation ceased to be a boring chapter on agriculture in fifth grade textbooks, or the province of such as bird watchers.” Despite its $25 cover price, it became a best-seller in the San Francisco Bay Area and did well across the country. When a cheaper version was published in 1967, it became the best-selling trade paperback of the year. Porter’s 1963 book The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado, a counterpoint to his first, was similarly successful and influential. It is impossible to see what those images looked like when they first appeared, precisely because of their success.
There are two kinds of artistic success. One makes an artist’s work distinctive and recognizable to a large public in his or her time and afterward—Picasso might be a case in point. The greater success is more paradoxical: the work becomes so compelling that it eventually becomes how we see and imagine, rather than what we look at. Invisible most of the time, such art may look obvious or even hackneyed when we catch sight of it. Such success generates imitations not only by other artists but throughout the culture: the ubiquitous photography in advertisements, calendars, and posters imitating the color aesthetic Porter founded may tell hikers and tourists what to look for in the natural world, and thus they may experience his aesthetic as nature rather than art. Color demanded different compositions and called attention to different aspects of the natural world than did black and white photography.
Porter’s work came into the world as the product of an individual talent and became a genre, nature photography, in which thousands of professionals and amateurs toil (though most of them value beauty more and truth less than Porter did). His photographs have become how we look at the natural world, what we look for and value in it, what the public often tries to photograph, and what a whole genre of photography imitates. Porter’s pictures of nature look, so to speak, “natural” now, and this is the greatest cultural success any ideology or aesthetic can have. We now live in a world Porter helped to invent. It is because his pictures exist behind our eyes that it is sometimes hard to see the Porters in front of one’s eyes for what they were and are. Thus, understanding Porter’s photography means understanding the world in which it first appeared and the aesthetic and environmental effects it has had since.
SILENCE AND WILDNESS
Sierra Club executive director David Brower chose to publish In Wildness in the centennial year of Henry David Thoreau’s death; each of Porter’s images was paired with a passage from Thoreau. But 1962 had plenty of history of its own. In September of that year, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published, and this indictment of the pesticide industry quickly became a controversy and a bestseller. In October, President John Kennedy announced that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and that the United States would attack unless they were removed: the world came closer to an all-out nuclear war than at any time before or since. “The very existence of mankind is in the balance,” the secretary-general of the United Nations declared. This context must have prepared the ground for the reception of In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, which appeared in November. At the end of World War II, the revelations of the atomic bomb and the concentration camps had begun to erode faith in leaders, scientists, and the rhetoric of progress; and as the fifties wore on, that faith continued to crumble. Silent Spring and the Cuban missile crisis were only the crescendos of events that had long been building, and In Wildness may have succeeded in part as a response to these circumstances.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, fear of a possible nuclear war was coupled with fear of what preparing for one entailed. The 1959 discovery that, in many parts of the country, milk—both bovine and human—was contaminated by fallout from atomic testing led to a national outcry. That what ought to be the most natural and nurturing thing in the world contained gene-altering, cancer-causing, manmade substances meant that nature was no longer a certainty beyond the reach of science and politics, and it meant that the government was generating biological contamination in the name of political protection. Similarly disastrous pesticide spraying campaigns in the nation’s national forests had already provoked an uproar by the late 1950s (and Porter was among those decrying their abuse, with letters to his local newspaper). Science and politics had invaded the private realm of biology, reproduction, and health as never before. Carson wrote of pesticides, “Their presence casts a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure, no less frightening because it is simply impossible to predict the effects of lifetime exposure.” The world faced a new kind of fear, of nature itself altered, of mutations, extinctions, contaminations that had never before been imagined. Porter wrote in a 1961 letter, “Conservation has rather suddenly become a major issue in the country—that is more people in higher and more influential places are aware of its importance and willing to do something about it.”
Pesticides and radiation were only part of the strange cocktail that fueled what gets called “the sixties.” In November 1961, Women Strike for Peace, the most effective of the early antinuclear groups, was launched with a nationwide protest that in many ways prefigured the feminist revolution. In 1962, the civil rights movement was supercharged, the United Farm Workers was founded, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held its first national convention. The voiceless were acquiring voices, and with them they were questioning the legitimacy of those in power and the worldview they promulgated. Some of those with voices were speaking up for nature and wilderness with an urgency never before heard. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the epochal Wilderness Bill was being debated alongside pesticide and radiation issues: nature in its remotest reaches and most intimate details was at stake. It is in this context that the small American conservation movement became the broad-based environmental movement, and Porter played a role in its broadening.
The ecological truth Silent Spring tells as a nightmare—that everything is connected, so that our chemical sins will follow us down the decades and the waterways—is what In Wildness depicts as a beatific vision. Carson’s book addressed a very specific history, that of the development of new toxins during World War II and their application afterward to civilian uses; and she wrote about their effects on birds, on roadside foliage, on the human body, and on the vast ecosystems within which these entities exist. “The world of systemic insecticides,” she wrote, “is a weird world . . . where the enchanted forest of the fairy tales has become the poisonous forest in which an insect that chews a leaf or sucks the sap of a plant is doomed. It is a world where . . . a bee may carry poisonous nectar back to its hive and presently produce poisonous honey.” Porter’s book showed the forest still enchanted, outside historical time and within the cyclical time of the seasons (the photographs had earlier appeared in an exhibition titled The Seasons, and the images are sequenced to depict spring, summer, fall, and winter). Only one image, of a mud swallow’s nest built against raw planks, showed traces of human presence at all, and that presence is slight and benign.
The year before, Wallace Stegner had coined the term “the geography of hope,” countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it. The Sierra Club’s Exhibit Fo
rmat photography books could be, as environmental historian Stephen Fox points out, a way to bring the wilderness to the people rather than the other way round, to show them the geography of hope and create a kind of virtual access without impact. In Wildness was in many ways a hopeful book, an intimate portrait of an apparently undamaged world of streams, blackberries, moths, saplings—and a later Porter book would be titled Baja California and the Geography of Hope. These photographic books were in some sense documents, but in another, equally important sense, they were promises: not only did they confirm the existence of what they depicted, but they also showed what the future could hold—and it is a mark of profound change that the best hope for the future in the time of these books was for a future that resembled an untrammeled past, that industrial civilization yearned for Eden rather than the New Jerusalem.
Despite its lyrical celebration of the timeless and nonhuman, Porter’s first book was widely recognized as a political book. Environmentalism is about what is worth protecting, as well as what threatens it; politics is ultimately about what we value and fear—and In Wildness spoke directly of these things. In a review of the 1967 edition, Sports Illustrated proclaimed, “Hundreds of books and articles have been written urging private citizens to do something (‘Write your Congressman, now!’) about the destruction of the nation’s natural beauties, but the most persuasive volume of all contained not a word of impassioned argument, not a single polemic.”
In fact, it did contain a few words of impassioned argument—at the end of his introduction, Joseph Wood Krutch stated, “If those who believe in progress and define it as they do continue to have their way it will soon be impossible either to test [Thoreau’s] theory that Nature is the only proper context of human life or that in such a context we may ultimately learn the ‘higher laws.’ One important function of a book like this will have been performed if it persuades those who open it that some remnant of the beauties it calls to our attention is worth preserving.” Out of these last two subtly wrought sentences comes an avalanche of assertions: that progress as conventionally imagined was devastating the natural world, perhaps irreversibly; that nature is a necessary but imperiled moral authority; that Porter portrays not only nature itself but also its moral authority; that the purpose of Porter’s book may be to help rally citizens to preserve this nature; that photographs of blackberries, birds, and streams can be politically and philosophically persuasive because love of nature can be inculcated through beauty; and that such love can lead to political action on its behalf.
Modernity had placed its faith in science, culture, and progress. A kind of Rousseauist antimodernism that would be central both to the counterculture and to the environmental movement put its faith in nature, usually nature as an ideal of how things were before various interventions: before human contact, before the industrial revolution, before Euro-Americans, before chemical contaminations—an Edenic ideal. Krutch, who had had a distinguished career as a literary critic before he left the East Coast intelligentsia for Arizona and nature writing, embodies this shift—”an exile from modernism,” curator John Rohrback has called him, cast out of the city into the garden. Krutch was a major ally of Porter, and Porter supplied Americans with one definition of what that nature worth preserving was (it is seldom acknowledged that that definition was made possible by a technologically advanced and aesthetically sophisticated art; such an acknowledgment would have greatly complicated the arguments).
In his next book, Porter depicted a place that had been as pristine as anything shown in In Wildness, or perhaps more so, but that by the time of publication had been lost or at least hidden: the labyrinthine canyonlands drowned by the Glen Canyon Dam. The Sierra Club had done an earlier book, in 1955, titled This Is Dinosaur, which campaigned against putting a dam in Dinosaur National Monument. The Place No One Knew, like This Is Dinosaur, was a crusade against a dam.
Porter portrayed Glen Canyon as a gallery of stone walls in reds, browns, and grays and of gravel-and-mud floors through which water flowed, occasionally interspersed with images of foliage and, much more rarely, the sky. Some found it claustrophobic and longed for more conventional distant views. This book was much more radical than In Wildness—radical formally, in its compositions; radical politically, in the directness of its advocacy; and radical conceptually, in its depiction of a vast place facing an imminent doom that would have been unimaginable only a century before. Most beautiful images, particularly photographs, and most particularly landscape photographs, are invitations of a sort; but this one was the opposite: a survey of what could no longer be encountered, a portrait of the condemned before the execution, “the geography of doom.” The beautiful images were inflected by information from outside the frame: all this was being drowned. As environmental writer and photographer Stephen Trimble wrote about Glen Canyon:
When I explored the Colorado Plateau, I carried Eliot’s pictures in my head, and tried to let them guide my eye and then inspire me to see the same places and colors in my own way. My greatest sorrow is not having seen Glen Canyon. . . . It makes me sick at heart to look at the reservoir that drowned and destroyed the heart of the landscape that is my spiritual home. The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado is the best book title of the second half of the 20th Century—and my first and best entry point into the lost basilica of my personal religion.
Elsewhere Trimble wrote, “The message was clear: go out into the land, stand up for it, fight its destruction—you lose forever when you fail to know the land well enough to speak for it.”
FLOW AND CONVERGENCE
Many sources converge in the complex body of mature work, and that work arrived in a world that was ready to receive it only after Porter, color photography processes, and public awareness had evolved far beyond where they were when he began photographing in 1937, the year he turned thirty-six. Among the factors feeding Porter’s vision were a socially conscious family, whose influence contributed to his lifelong support of human rights and environmental causes; a boyhood passion for the natural world; an involvement with photography from late childhood on; a medical and scientific education that gave him the skills to develop color photography technology; the inherited funds that allowed him to stand apart from fashions and pressures; and a sense of himself as an artist, dating from Alfred Stieglitz’s recognition of his work at the end of the 1930s. In his training as a doctor and biomedical researcher, Porter refined his understanding of biology, chemistry, and laboratory work, which would stand him in good stead as a nature photographer, an environmentalist, and an innovator of color photography processes. “I did not consider those years wasted,” he told a group of students. “Without those experiences it would be impossible to predict what course my life would have taken, least of all that it would be in photography. In retrospect, from my experience it appears highly desirable to order one’s life in accord with inner yearnings no matter how impractical.”
His grounding in both art and science is evident in statements such as this: “During my career as a photographer I discovered that color was essential to my pursuit of beauty in nature. I believe that when photographers reject the significance of color, they are denying one of our most precious biological attributes—color vision—that we share with relatively few other animal species.” The statement moves from beauty to biology, aesthetics to science, as though it were the most natural thing in the world; and for Porter it evidently was, though few others could or would deploy biology in arguing art. This mix made him something of a maverick or a misfit in mainstream photography circles—even the landscapists didn’t ground their work in science as he did. As a photographer, he engaged with evidence of natural processes, biodiversity, the meeting of multiple systems, with growth, decay, and entropy. Book designer Eleanor Caponigro recalled:
Over the many years that I worked with him I became more and more aware of this complex composite of a man who was an extremely sensitive, articulate, visual artist and who was a scientist and a natu
ralist. He was a doctor. So you’d be looking at photographs and they would have their own aesthetic beauty, and—it came up often in the Antarctica book—he’d say, “But this is how this rift is formed, by these two land masses coming across. And this particular lichen occurs in this particular setup. And these are the dry valleys and the desiccated seals and this is how this happened and this is what happens when an iceberg rolls over and it’s absorbed . . .” You know, so he was fascinated by all of that, and I think that’s what drew him to photography instead of a different visual medium, because it solved, or it satisfied, this quality of scientific exploration for him.
One aspect of his life Porter himself seldom spoke of in his books and lectures was his political views outside of environmental issues, but his archives portray him as an engaged citizen, informed about and involved in the activities of his government locally, nationally, and internationally. (In this, too, he has much in common with Thoreau, who is best known for his writing about nature but who took a strong stance on slavery, the Mexican-American War, and other issues of the time.) In 1924, while hopping freight trains in the West, Porter joined the IWW—the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. Though he must have been influenced by the fact that IWW members were less likely to be rolled by brakemen, his act reveals an awareness and sympathy with radicals perhaps not common among Harvard students from wealthy families. His tax records portray him as a staunch supporter of human rights and progressive causes: the American Civil Liberties Union was the one organization that he donated to year after year throughout his life, and in the 1930s he gave small sums to support the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War and the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Documents in his archives show that he was concerned about pesticides long before Silent Spring appeared, along with logging, grazing on public lands, and other subjects that environmental activists have since taken up. Later, he would write to politicians and newspapers repeatedly about the war in Vietnam and the Watergate crisis, both of which outraged him; he also took an interest in Native American issues long before most of the non-Native public was aware that there were any. Though his principles involved him with many questions of the day, his passion and his talent were dedicated to environmental causes, particularly wildlife and wilderness.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 25