Eliot Porter

By eeyorebanana

  • born in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois

  • got his first camera

    Kodak Brownie box camera

  • Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay, Maine became his family's summer home

  • graduates from Harvard and enters Harvard Medical School

    studied biochemistry and bacteriology before receiving a degree in medicine from Harvard

  • suspends studies at Harvard Medical School and enters University of Cambridge, England, to study biochemistry

  • receives M.D. from Harvard Medical School

  • researches and teaches bacteriology, biochemistry, and biophysics at Harvard Medical Schoo

  • became interested in photography

  • resigns from teaching and research to pursue photography as a career

  • experiments with making color prints in his Chicago darkroom; settles on using Kodak’s wash-off relief process

  • awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph various species of North American birds

  • 54 of his bird photographs were featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  • moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico

  • first nature photographer to shoot exclusively in a color way

  • poduced seven portfolios of nearly eight thousand prints

  • began making photographic books with the Sierra Club

  • gained a major boost from "In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World" (book)

  • wrote that he hoped his color photographs would reveal "a new dimension" in the perception and representaion of nature in photography

  • dream to share his bird pictures with a broad audience was realized

  • poduced seven portfolios of nearly eight thousand prints

  • archive contained more than 8,000 negatives and transparencies of North American birds

  • passed away