225
| “As I became interested in photography in the realm of nature . . .”: Eliot Porter,
Eliot Porter
, Photographs and text by Eliot Porter, foreword by Martha A. Sandweiss (Fort Worth and Boston: New York Graphic Society and Amon Carter Museum, 1987), p. 83.
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225
| “cannot be categorized . . .”: Guy Davenport,
National Review
, December 18, 1963.
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225
| “A kind of revolution was underway . . .”: Stephen Fox,
John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), p. 317, quoting the October 1974 issue of
Smithsonian
magazine.
|
226
| Porter’s pictures of nature look, so to speak, “natural” now: A parallel history might be that of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden, which imitated nature and then became what people looked for in nature—that is, they looked for landscapes whose features resembled those celebrated in the gardens. By the nineteenth century, the gardens had become unnecessary as specific locations and intentional constructions; they had evolved into how people looked at unaltered landscapes. In other words, the garden was no longer a constructed place but a constructed frame of reference for looking at places. (Yosemite Valley, for example, was often praised for resembling an “English park.”)
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227
| “The very existence of mankind . . .”: cited in Spencer R. Weart,
Nuclear Fear
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 258.
|
228
| “Their presence casts a shadow . . .”: Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p. 188.
|
228
| “Conservation has rather suddenly become a major issue . . .”: Eliot Porter, letter to Aline Porter, April 11, 1961, in Stephen Porter file, Eliot Porter Archives, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.
|
228
| “The world of systemic insecticides . . .”: Carson,
Silent Spring
, p. 32.
|
229
| “the geography of hope”: This phrase appears in a letter from Wallace Stegner to Dave Pesonen, originally titled “The Wilderness Idea”; it was read by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall as part of his presentation “Conservation in the 1960s: Action or Stalemate?” at the Sierra Club’s 1961 wilderness
conference. The proceedings were published as
Wilderness: America’s Living Heritage
, ed. David Brower (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1961). “What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical-minded—but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them” (Brower,
Wilderness
, p. 97; the phrase “the geography of hope” appears on p. 102). The letter in its original version is printed in Stegner’s anthology
The Sound of Mountain Water
(New York: Dutton, 1980). Of course, in the very different times of the early twenty-first century, it can be argued that hope is sometimes misplaced—that images like Porter’s were and can be reassuring, when reassurance is far from what’s needed. But on January 28, 1969, a James W. Moorman of Washington, D.C., wrote to the Sierra Club, “I learned of the Club about four years ago when “In Wildness” and “These We Inherit” caught my eye in a New York bookstore. These wonderful, transcendent books touched me as few things have.
|
| I am not ashamed to say they restored hope. . . . If man created such books, then perhaps man could be persuaded to stop the destruction” (folder 2:25, Publications, Ansel Adams Papers, Sierra Club Archives, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley). The books in this case worked exactly as intended.
|
229
| a way to bring the wilderness to the people: “The club’s Exhibit Format books offered an ironic variation on Muir’s old scheme of creating conservationists by depositing them in the Sierra. Instead of bringing people to the wilderness, Brower’s publishing program brought the wilderness to people—with much the same conversion effect—through books that were hard to put down. Over the first four years, fifty thousand were sold, 80 percent through bookstores and mainly to nonmembers of the Sierra Club. The number of buyers was further increased by a distribution arrangement with Ballantine Books of New York. A cheaper edition of
Wildness
was the best-selling trade paperback of 1967. By 1969 total sales amounted to $10 million” (Fox,
John Muir and His Legacy
, p. 319).
|
229
| “Hundreds of books and articles . . .”:
Sports Illustrated
, November 22, 1967.
|
229
| “If those who believe in progress . . .”: Joseph Wood Krutch, “Introduction,”
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1962), p. 13.
|
231
| “When I explored the Colorado Plateau . . .”: Stephen Trimble, letter to the author, January 3, 2000.
|
231
| “The message was clear . . .”: Stephen Trimble, “Reinventing the West: Private Choices and Consequences in Photography,”
Buzzworm
, November-December 1991, pp. 46–54. Michael Cohen pointed out (in a note to the author) that the Glen Canyon book sent people in search of that sense of place throughout the Colorado Plateau, generating, among other things, a “plethora of Antelope Canyon pictures.”
|
232
| “I did not consider those years wasted . . .”: Porter,
Eliot Porter
, p. 29.
|
232
| “During my career as a photographer . . .”: ibid., p. 83.
|
232
| “Over the many years that I worked with him . . .”: Eleanor Caponigro, interviewed by John Rohrbach, January 16, 1995, typescript, p. 3, Eliot Porter Archives.
|
234
| “of comparable sensibility . . .”: Porter,
Eliot Porter
, p. 45.
|
234
| “The enclosed clipping is a letter I wrote . . .”: Eliot Porter, letter to Stephen Porter, November 29, 1958, Stephen Porter file, Eliot Porter Archives.
|
235
| “Photography is a strong tool . . .”: Eliot Porter, “Photography and Conservation,” manuscript in Notes on Conservation file, box 40, Eliot Porter Archives.
|
235
| “changed Dave’s whole way of looking at the conservation movement. . . .”: Edgar Wayburn cited by Michael P. Cohen,
The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), p. 293.
|
236
| “The conspicuous success of
Wildness
. . .”: Fox,
John Muir and His Legacy
, pp. 318–319.
|
237
| On the links between the books and the club’s campaigns, see Cohen,
History of the Sierra Club
, pp. 424–426. The Earth National Park ad was one of the last straws in Brower’s relationship with the Sierra Club board, who perceived it as both an unauthorized expenditure and a far too vague and
utopian idea to mesh with their commitment to concrete protections and realizable goals.
|
237
| “The idea of playing hardball with big corporations . . .”: Philip Berry, oral history interview, Sierra Club Archives. The club was accustomed to cordial relations with the sources of power;
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World
was underwritten by a philanthropic arm of the giant Bechtel Corporation—which built Hoover Dam, countless oil pipelines around the world, and Glen Canyon Dam and now manages the nuclear weapons program at the Nevada Test Site.
|
238
| “was most eloquently stated, really, by Eliot Porter . . .”: ibid., p. 27.
|
238
| “Every acre that is lost . . .”: Eliot Porter,
Sierra Club Bulletin
, 1969, from Short Statements on Conservation 1958–1971 file, box 41, Eliot Porter Archives.
|
239
| For Hildebrand’s criticism of Porter, see Alex Hildebrand, oral history interview,
Sierra Club Leaders, 1950s–1970s
, p. 21, Sierra Club Archives. Hildebrand was a Standard Oil executive and part of the club’s old guard.
|
239
| Adams—who had mixed feelings about color photography: Porter often depicted Ansel Adams as an intimidating and difficult figure, and certainly Adams made many disparaging comments about color photography over the years. But Virginia Adams apparently tried to get an early version of
In Wildness
published, and Adams’s letter of congratulations to Porter for
The Place No One Knew
is generous. Perhaps because of his many years of involvement with the club, Adams took a more pragmatic view on everything from publications to Diablo Canyon. In those years, Brower annoyed the two artists with his oft-repeated comment that “Porter is the Sierra Club’s most valuable property” (in, for example, a letter of November 16, 1966, in the Publications files of the Sierra Club Archives); Porter did not regard himself as property, and Adams felt disparaged by the focus on Porter. During those years, the Sierra Club letterhead featured an Ansel Adams photograph.
|
239
| “There was a great deal of opposition to the proposal . . .”: Porter,
Eliot Porter
, p. 53.
|
239
| “other projects have higher conservation priority . . .”: Edgar Wayburn, letter, September 9, 1967, file 2, box 30, David Brower Papers, Sierra Club Archives. Many other Sierra Club board members felt that books should be tied to conservation objectives. Martin Litton tartly recalled, “Along came the exhibit format books. They were done in black and white which, of course, was cheap. In those days not too much color was done anyway. That was the perfect stage for Ansel Adams’s material. You had these terrific books, most of which did not pinpoint any subject. They were just all over the place, like
This Is the American Earth
. Pretty pictures of America with a little message by Nancy Newhall or whoever under each one about how lovely it is we still have Mount Whitney there. It didn’t do anything political. It showed the Sierra Club could publish books, and books like that weren’t all that common then as they are now” (Litton, oral history interview, p. 79, Sierra Club Archives). Board member August Frugé agreed with Adams and Wayburn when he wrote to Brower on February 2, 1969: “We have little need for coffee table books on the Alps and the Scottish Highlands (planned for 1969), but we desperately need books that will help us save Lake Tahoe, San Francisco Bay, the Everglades, Lake Superior, and many other places” (folder 2:26, Ansel Adams Papers, Sierra Club Archives).
|
239
| “The publications committee of the Sierra Club . . .”: Porter,
Eliot Porter
, p. 54.
|
240
| “Adams argued that Brower would not accept a position . . .”: Cohen,
History of the Sierra Club
, p. 421.
|
240
| “During a board meeting . . .”: Porter,
Eliot Porter
, p. 56. In a letter to Brower on March 4, 1968, Porter wrote, “I am getting a little weary of being told one day that I am a valuable property of the Sierra Club and the next day lectured on my responsibilities to the Sierra Club and conservation. Sometimes I think that you would like me to feel guilty for making any money at all from Sierra Club publications. . . . My contribution to conservation may not be enough in your eyes but after all this is a matter that each of us has to decide for himself. My contribution is considerably different from yours and may be judged considerably less, but whatever the judgment is I resent its being down-graded. And this happens when my books are publicized
as Sierra Club publications without credit going to me or my name mentioned.”
|
241
| “There is no subject and background . . .”: Fairfield Porter,
The Nation
, January 1960, p. 39. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, in a review of Fairfield Porter’s paintings, “Porter was born real-estate rich in a suburb of Chicago to a family that had deep roots in New England. His gloomy father was a frustrated architect, his mother a lifelong amateur in social causes and cultural uplift. . . . In 1927, he travelled to Moscow, where he had his first exposure to the paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard, and an audience with Leon Trotsky, who allowed Porter to sketch him. . . . Settling in New York, he became embroiled in radical politics and painted a mural, now lost, entitled ‘Turn Imperialist War Into Civil War’ ” (New
Yorker
, April 17, 2000). Among the differences between the Porter brothers is that Fairfield found his métier early on and eventually the painting became quite separate from the politics, while older brother Eliot struggled to define a new medium that eventually allowed him to bring politics and aesthetics together.
|
241
| first principle of ecology: Carolyn Merchant, “Feminism and Ecology,” appendix B, in
Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered
, by Bill Devall and George Sessions (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1985), p. 229. Merchant also quotes Commoner.
|
242
| “Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. . . .”: Porter,
Eliot Porter
, p. 44.
|
