NYAB Event - Eliot Porter Exhibition

Eliot Porter Exhibition

Paula Cooper Gallery "521 W 21 St."

This event has ended.

The Paula Cooper Gallery presents a one-person exhibition of works by renowned photographer Eliot Porter (1901-1990).

A dedicated naturalist and amateur photographer since his childhood in Winnetka, Illinois and Penobscot Bay, Maine, Eliot Porter’s first career was in medicine (he taught biochemistry and bacteriology at the Harvard Medical School for a decade).

In 1938 when Alfred Steiglitz offered Dr. Porter a show at his celebrated gallery on Fifth Avenue, Porter decided to give up medicine and devote his full energies to photography. He received a Guggenheim fellowship three years later, and except for military research at MIT during the war years, Porter focused on employing the large-format camera and the unforgiving dye-transfer print as instruments of fine art.

Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and other prominent museums followed, as did more than a dozen books including In Wildness is the Preservation of the Earth, The Tree Where Man Was Born and other studies of “intimate landscapes” and natural history around the world. Eliot Porter died in 1990.

Each picture in this exhibit, whether color or black and white, is a vintage print made by Eliot Porter and selected by Jack Macrae, Porter’s long-time editor, publisher, and friend. Kristoffer Haynes has co-curated the show with Mr. Macrae.