Like Forman Hanna, Eliot Porter found inspiration in the
drama of clouds at sunset in the American Southwest. Yet Porter felt no
compulsion to keep his desert landscape in view, instead giving over the entire
frame to fiery red cirrus clouds against a mauve sky. Porter’s commitment to
recording the beauty of the natural world served a distinct social purpose. A
lifelong environmentalist, Porter considered such images “propaganda devices”
that raised awareness by picturing an Earth worth preserving. Vibrant color
photographs, which were considered garish and commercial by the art
establishment well into the 1970s, buttressed his project by more fully
describing the splendors of nature. His cause received a major boost with the
publication of In Wildness Is the
Preservation of the World (1962), a highly successful book pairing Porter’s
photographs of ecologically significant places with excerpts from the Romantic
writer Henry David Thoreau.