IS BEAUTY ENOUGH?

ELIOT PORTER:
THE COLOR OF WILDNESS
On view at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine
From January 22 to March 21, 2004

Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves

Many years ago, I went to a writers’ conference in northern Maine, where we were all distracted by the overwhelming presence of the sky and the quality of the speakers. The great Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod was there as well as Wesley McNair and Cathie Pelletier. Sanford Phippen was also there, and he described what it was like to grow up in Maine near Mount Desert Island where there were two classes of people—those who were very rich and those who worked for the very rich. His family fell into the second category, and, as a result, Maine was not exactly vacationland for them. Phippen concluded with a statement and a question: Yes, the Mount Desert area is very beautiful. But is that enough?

I thought of this at a recent exhibit of Eliot Porter’s photography at the Portland Museum of Art. Porter was keen on nature, vivid color (some might say too vivid), and beauty, and all three were in ample supply in Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness. For the most part (there are a few exceptions, which I will discuss later), this exhibition comprises lovely photographs of, among other subjects, birds; bird nests; dark red rocks in Utah; coastal and wooded scenes on Great Spruce Island, Maine; more woods and trees in the Great Smoky Mountains; as well as scenes of Baja, the Galápagos, China, Antarctica, and East Africa. In addition, the exhibit features books with Porter’s photographs.

According to the museum handout, Porter was also an environmentalist. In 1962, the Sierra Club published In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, “which combined the writings of Henry David Thoreau with Porter’s powerful images of the New England Woods.” Indeed, many of the photographs in The Color of Wildness feature ecosystems that Porter wanted to preserve, and his hope was that if people could only see how beautiful these places were, then they would be moved to help save them.

Porter wrote, “I saw that the camera could be a powerful instrument for persuasion for other than exclusively aesthetic and creative purposes without diminishing in the slightest degree the artistic integrity of the camera.”

This is all well and good. But did he succeed? To the exhibition’s credit, it presents two opposing points of view, one aesthetic and the other philosophical. Ansel Adams, representing the aesthetic, described color photography as “garish.” While not all color photographs are guilty of being garish, many are, and this is certainly true of some of the photographs in The Color of Wildness. Too often, the blues and the greens are just too blue and green. The photographs might be beautiful, but the colors are jarring, and, yes, even garish. As I went through the exhibit, the chorus of Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” ran through my mind. “Kodachrome/They give us those nice bright colors/They give us the greens of summers/Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah.”

Representing the philosophical was Peter Beard, a wildlife photographer, who doesn’t seem to object to color as much as he does to beauty. Like Porter, Beard is a conservationist, but unlike Porter, Beard focuses on death—corpses and dying animals. Beard feels people need to see the ugly, destructive side of development, and this will compel them to take action. Porter complained that Beard’s photographs “played to a morbid curiosity.” Although none of Beard’s photographs are in the exhibit, I expect Porter has a point; death can be overdone to the point where people become inured to grisly images. However, overfocusing on either ugliness or beauty can paradoxically lead to the same flaw. That is, a lack of balance and therefore a lack of a true vision.

Appropriately enough, in The Color of Wildness, the photographs that have the most power are not the ones that are solely beautiful, and a couple are so ugly that I expect even Peter Beard would approve of them. Mired Elephant, Tsavo East, Kenya, October 25, 1970 is a perfect example of the latter. An emaciated elephant is embedded in a thick, gray ooze. It is lying on its side, and its gray body melds with the mud, but the trunk and the tusk are clearly defined. It is a repulsive picture of death and decay, and the viewer wants to look but at the same time doesn’t want to look.

Another photograph that fits this category is Dog Skeleton, Robert Scott's Hut, Cape Evans, Ross Island, Antarctica, December 1975. A rib cage with white, white bones is attached to a dog’s neck and head, which are still covered with tan skin. A brown collar fits snugly around the dog’s neck. To his credit, Mr. Porter clearly did not approve of Scott’s treatment of dogs. “Scott’s attitude toward dogs, which contributed to the tragic outcome of his polar expedition, is evident in his journal.”

The fey Ice Cave, near Scott Base, Ross Island, Antarctica, December 7, 1975 is quite another matter. It is a blue, otherworldly picture of snow and ice that have come together in a womblike swirl. If Georgia O’Keefe had gone to Antarctica, this is the sort of picture she might have painted.

Flamingos on Lake Natron from the Air, Tanzania, October 15, 1970 presents an entirely different point of view. Here, the emphasis is on form and color. The flamingos scarcely look like flamingos. Instead, they are many dots of pink, curled like a comma, on deep blue water.

Ferry, Chongqing, Sichuan, China, Summer 1980 also focuses on form and color and has touches of ugliness thrown in for good measure. A ferry, snubbed up against a larger white boat, rests lengthwise across the river. The ferry has the same sickening yellow hue as the water, and the photograph is suffused with the color of ill-health.

These glimmers of variety bring us back to Sanford Phippen’s original question. Is beauty enough? No, it is not. If there isn’t something more, then the work is merely decorative. However, after doing research on the Internet for this piece, I discovered that Eliot Porter’s range was wider than the photographs at the Portland show illustrate. Amon Carter Museum has a website (http://www.cartermuseum.org/) that features, among other works of art, Porter’s photographs, many of which are in the Portland show. But, there are also other photographs. On this website, the viewer can see that although beauty was indeed one of Porter’s chief concerns, it was not his only focus. The photographs on the website demonstrate that Porter was interested in texture, form, order, death, and decay as well as beauty.

Nevertheless, The Color of Wildness is worth seeing. Not only does it present a history of Porter’s photographs, but it also brings in a variety of ideas and shows opposing viewpoints. And for all my comments about how beauty is not enough, I must conclude that there are worse ways to spend time in the dead of winter than looking at bright, beautiful photographs.

 

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