The Place No One Knew:
Glen Canyon on the Colorado
by Eliot Porter

It was sometime in the mid 1960s when I was wandering through the University Book Store (Seattle) that I came across a portfolio of about a dozen pages from this book. I had never seen anything like them. Sharp and saturated color. I didn't know about large format at the time. They were also printed very expensively. It was a landmark book from the Sierra Club. I still have those pages. My library has the original version with those shiny pages. It was interesting looking at them over 40 years later. We've come a long way in the color world. Porter was doing color in the 1950s and 1960s when no one else was. He printed using the dye transfer process. (Ctein is one of the few left that's mastered this difficult process.) We have so much more control now with Photoshop and digital printing. The picture on the book cover is a good example. In the original book the area in sunlight is very washed out. It's still worth looking at. And the battle over Glen Canyon still goes on.

Eliot Porter Collection Guide

Eliot Porter (1901–1990) introduced color to landscape photography. In so doing, he created a new way of viewing the world that today has become commonplace. An artist with strong scientific and environmental interests, Porter took up color in 1939, long before his fellow photographers accepted the medium, to produce more accurate photographs of birds. Soon thereafter, he expanded his focus to celebrate the colorful beauty of nature in general. Over a fifty-year career that includes works from Maine to China, he built a broad popular reputation based on thousands of richly hued prints and twenty-five books. His work energized environmentalists, drew accolades from museums, and created the foundations for today’s color nature photography.

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