"Forever Wild: The Adirondacks" 1966 PORTER, Eliot
$125
PORTER, Eliot
The Adirondack Museum/ Harper & Row
1966
First Edition
14" x 10 1/2"
Fine/ Fine
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“'In Wildness is the Preservation of the World,’ Selections and Photographs by Eliot Porter,” a book that set Henry David Thoreau’s rousing words to Porter’s nature photography, which had harnessed Kodak’s latest advances in color film. One reviewer enthused at the time that, with the publication of Porter’s photographs, “conservation ceased to be a boring chapter on agriculture in fifth-grade textbooks, or the province of such as birdwatchers.”
That same year, Harold Hochschild, president of the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, together with his wife, Mary, commissioned some photographs from Porter. The Hochschilds were responding to private developers’ challenges to the New York State constitution’s “forever wild” clause. The two planned to recruit several photographers and publish a book to promote the region’s natural beauty. They had expected no more than a dozen images from Porter, but the photographer had gleefully located “an inexhaustible wealth of subjects,” as he later recalled. He gave them over a hundred. Meeting at the couple’s winter residence in Princeton, New Jersey, the three of them decided to produce a different sort of book—published 50 years ago next year—that became “Forever Wild: The Adirondacks” (1966), which set Porter’s color images to nature writer William Chapman White’s poetry.
New to the area, Porter found much to admire about the Adirondacks. He delighted in the region’s geological history and the networks of rivers, ponds, and lakes. He was fond of noting that the Adirondacks peaked in the fall, when the “blueberry bushes glow like the coals of burned-out fires in the slanting rays of the sun.” Porter honors that season in his photographs, but also the spring, summer, and winter. His best pictures, which forgo mannered camera angles and create radically foregrounded landscapes, are like flattened tapestries sewn with rock, water, tree, and leaf (they also suggest an interest in Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painting from that time—styles that eliminated illusions of depth and stressed the canvas’ flat surface). Here, Porter later said, was “a land where one can still see what the land once was…where the human spirit can yet be free.”