Storming the Gates of Paradise (33 page)

Despite its lyrical celebration of the timeless and nonhuman, Porter’s first book was widely recognized as a political book. Environmentalism is about what is worth protecting, as well as what threatens it; politics is ultimately about what we value and fear—and
In Wildness
spoke directly of these things. In a review of the 1967 edition,
Sports Illustrated
proclaimed, “Hundreds of books and articles have been written urging private citizens to do something (‘Write your Congressman, now!’) about the destruction of the nation’s natural beauties, but the most persuasive volume of all contained not a word of impassioned argument, not a single polemic.”

In fact, it did contain a few words of impassioned argument—at the end of his introduction, Joseph Wood Krutch stated, “If those who believe in progress and define it as they do continue to have their way it will soon be impossible either to
test [Thoreau’s] theory that Nature is the only proper context of human life or that in such a context we may ultimately learn the ‘higher laws.’ One important function of a book like this will have been performed if it persuades those who open it that some remnant of the beauties it calls to our attention is worth preserving.” Out of these last two subtly wrought sentences comes an avalanche of assertions: that progress as conventionally imagined was devastating the natural world, perhaps irreversibly; that nature is a necessary but imperiled moral authority; that Porter portrays not only nature itself but also its moral authority; that the purpose of Porter’s book may be to help rally citizens to preserve this nature; that photographs of blackberries, birds, and streams can be politically and philosophically persuasive because love of nature can be inculcated through beauty; and that such love can lead to political action on its behalf.

Modernity had placed its faith in science, culture, and progress. A kind of Rousseauist antimodernism that would be central both to the counterculture and to the environmental movement put its faith in nature, usually nature as an ideal of how things were before various interventions: before human contact, before the industrial revolution, before Euro-Americans, before chemical contaminations—an Edenic ideal. Krutch, who had had a distinguished career as a literary critic before he left the East Coast intelligentsia for Arizona and nature writing, embodies this shift—”an exile from modernism,” curator John Rohrback has called him, cast out of the city into the garden. Krutch was a major ally of Porter, and Porter supplied Americans with one definition of what that nature worth preserving was (it is seldom acknowledged that that definition was made possible by a technologically advanced and aesthetically sophisticated art; such an acknowledgment would have greatly complicated the arguments).

In his next book, Porter depicted a place that had been as pristine as anything shown in
In Wildness
, or perhaps more so, but that by the time of publication had been lost or at least hidden: the labyrinthine canyonlands drowned by the Glen Canyon Dam. The Sierra Club had done an earlier book, in 1955, titled
This Is Dinosaur
, which campaigned against putting a dam in Dinosaur National Monument.
The Place No One Knew
, like
This Is Dinosaur
, was a crusade against a dam.

Porter portrayed Glen Canyon as a gallery of stone walls in reds, browns, and
grays and of gravel-and-mud floors through which water flowed, occasionally interspersed with images of foliage and, much more rarely, the sky. Some found it claustrophobic and longed for more conventional distant views. This book was much more radical than
In Wildness
—radical formally, in its compositions; radical politically, in the directness of its advocacy; and radical conceptually, in its depiction of a vast place facing an imminent doom that would have been unimaginable only a century before. Most beautiful images, particularly photographs, and most particularly landscape photographs, are invitations of a sort; but this one was the opposite: a survey of what could no longer be encountered, a portrait of the condemned before the execution, “the geography of doom.” The beautiful images were inflected by information from outside the frame: all this was being drowned. As environmental writer and photographer Stephen Trimble wrote about Glen Canyon:

When I explored the Colorado Plateau, I carried Eliot’s pictures in my head, and tried to let them guide my eye and then inspire me to see the same places and colors in my own way. My greatest sorrow is not having seen Glen Canyon. . . . It makes me sick at heart to look at the reservoir that drowned and destroyed the heart of the landscape that is my spiritual home.
The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado
is the best book title of the second half of the 20th Century—and my first and best entry point into the lost basilica of my personal religion.

Elsewhere Trimble wrote, “The message was clear: go out into the land, stand up for it, fight its destruction—you lose forever when you fail to know the land well enough to speak for it.”

Many sources converge in the complex body of mature work, and that work arrived in a world that was ready to receive it only after Porter, color photography processes, and public awareness had evolved far beyond where they were when he began photographing
in 1937, the year he turned thirty-six. Among the factors feeding Porter’s vision were a socially conscious family, whose influence contributed to his lifelong support of human rights and environmental causes; a boyhood passion for the natural world; an involvement with photography from late childhood on; a medical and scientific education that gave him the skills to develop color photography technology; the inherited funds that allowed him to stand apart from fashions and pressures; and a sense of himself as an artist, dating from Alfred Stieglitz’s recognition of his work at the end of the 1930s. In his training as a doctor and biomedical researcher, Porter refined his understanding of biology, chemistry, and laboratory work, which would stand him in good stead as a nature photographer, an environmentalist, and an innovator of color photography processes. “I did not consider those years wasted,” he told a group of students. “Without those experiences it would be impossible to predict what course my life would have taken, least of all that it would be in photography. In retrospect, from my experience it appears highly desirable to order one’s life in accord with inner yearnings no matter how impractical.”

His grounding in both art and science is evident in statements such as this: “During my career as a photographer I discovered that color was essential to my pursuit of beauty in nature. I believe that when photographers reject the significance of color, they are denying one of our most precious biological attributes—color vision—that we share with relatively few other animal species.” The statement moves from beauty to biology, aesthetics to science, as though it were the most natural thing in the world; and for Porter it evidently was, though few others could or would deploy biology in arguing art. This mix made him something of a maverick or a misfit in mainstream photography circles—even the landscapists didn’t ground their work in science as he did. As a photographer, he engaged with evidence of natural processes, biodiversity, the meeting of multiple systems, with growth, decay, and entropy. Book designer Eleanor Caponigro recalled:

Over the many years that I worked with him I became more and more aware of this complex composite of a man who was an extremely sensitive, articulate, visual artist and who was a scientist and a naturalist. He was a doctor. So you’d be looking at photographs and they would have their own aesthetic beauty, and—it
came up often in the Antarctica book—he’d say, “But this is how this rift is formed, by these two land masses coming across. And this particular lichen occurs in this particular setup. And these are the dry valleys and the desiccated seals and this is how this happened and this is what happens when an iceberg rolls over and it’s absorbed . . .” You know, so he was fascinated by all of that, and I think that’s what drew him to photography instead of a different visual medium, because it solved, or it satisfied, this quality of scientific exploration for him.

One aspect of his life Porter himself seldom spoke of in his books and lectures was his political views outside of environmental issues, but his archives portray him as an engaged citizen, informed about and involved in the activities of his government locally, nationally, and internationally. (In this, too, he has much in common with Thoreau, who is best known for his writing about nature but who took a strong stance on slavery, the Mexican-American War, and other issues of the time.) In 1924, while hopping freight trains in the West, Porter joined the IWW—the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. Though he must have been influenced by the fact that IWW members were less likely to be rolled by brakemen, his act reveals an awareness and sympathy with radicals perhaps not common among Harvard students from wealthy families. His tax records portray him as a staunch supporter of human rights and progressive causes: the American Civil Liberties Union was the one organization that he donated to year after year throughout his life, and in the 1930s he gave small sums to support the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War and the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Documents in his archives show that he was concerned about pesticides long before
Silent Spring
appeared, along with logging, grazing on public lands, and other subjects that environmental activists have since taken up. Later, he would write to politicians and newspapers repeatedly about the war in Vietnam and the Watergate crisis, both of which outraged him; he also took an interest in Native American issues long before most of the non-Native public was aware that there were any. Though his principles involved him with many questions of the day, his passion and his talent were dedicated to environmental causes, particularly wildlife and wilderness.

In 1939, Porter showed his bird photographs to Rachel Carson’s editor, Paul Brooks, who was then the head of Houghton Mifflin. Brooks shared Porter’s enthusiasm for natural phenomena—but not for the bird photographs. He told the artist that they would be far more valuable if they were in color. Thanks to this prodding, Porter became a pioneer of color photography. Eleven years later, he approached Brooks again, only to be told that his jewel-like bird images would be too expensive to publish in color and would have a limited audience anyway. Fortunately, Porter garnered support from other quarters, including the Museum of Modern Art’s David McAlpin, Ansel and Virginia Adams (who strove to find Porter a publisher early on), and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. Even so, he toiled imperturbably with little public recognition for more than twenty years after resuming photography, and neither the lack of attention during those years nor the avalanche of attention afterward seems to have swayed his sense of purpose.

The gist of those twenty years is familiar: Porter continued to photograph birds in the spring and summer and other subjects the rest of the year. When his wife, Aline, said that this other work was evocative of Thoreau’s writing, he began to read Thoreau with growing enthusiasm and to make pictures “of comparable sensibility. . . and for which I hoped to find a compatible description by Thoreau.” Like his bird photographs, his Thoreau photographs were admired and rejected by New York and Boston publishers. The story of his twenty years in the wilderness usually ends with his meeting with David Brower, and Porter himself let it be thought that it wasn’t until his meeting with the Sierra Club director that he began to put his photography to political uses. In fact, he had already been using it to lobby years before. In 1958, he wrote to his middle son, Stephen, “The enclosed clipping is a letter I wrote to the paper about the Wilderness Bill which I hope very much will pass in the next Congress. To influence this legislation I made up an album of photographs of wildlife pictures showing what would be saved by the bill and sent them to [nature writer Joseph Wood] Krutch who agreed to write a short text to go with them. We will then send the whole work to the Senate committee that is considering the bill in hopes that it will influence them to recommend its passage.” Whether the album was ever assembled and sent out is not known, but it demonstrates that by the 1950s Porter was linking his
art not only to science and literature but to politics, with hope of influencing outcomes.

When
In Wildness
appeared, it was a convergence of childhood wonder, modernist art photography, breakthrough color photography technology, scientific interest and acumen, and political awareness, a convergence that would continue and evolve through the subsequent books and years. Porter’s most significant contributions are his ability to use aesthetic means for political ends and his success in doing so. “Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment. . . . Photographs are believed more than words; thus they can be used persuasively to show people, who have never taken the trouble to look, what is there. They can point out beauties and relationships not previously believed or suspected to exist.”

In David Brower and the Sierra Club, Porter met a man and an organization that had put the aesthetic to political use in a way no other environmental group had. In 1939, long before Brower had become the club’s executive director, Ansel Adams had published
Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail
and sent it to Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, to lobby—successfully—for the creation of Kings Canyon National Park and the expansion of Sequoia National Park. A Californian who spent much time in the Sierra Nevada and a board member of the club from 1934 to 1971, Adams was far more deeply tied to the club than the easterner Porter would ever be. It was another of Adams’s books that opened the door for Porter. Brower had published
This Is the American Earth
in 1960; its black and white photographs were mostly by Adams, and its Whitmanesque text by Nancy Newhall. Rather like the 1955
The Family of Man
, this landscape photography book was more rhapsody than documentary survey, and it was a respectable financial success. Edgar Wayburn, who was the club’s president from 1961 to 1964, recalled that
This Is the American Earth
“changed Dave’s whole way of looking at the conservation movement. He saw what a book could do.” It was the first of the
Exhibit Format books the club would publish, books that would introduce many Americans both to fine art photography and to their public lands. A few subsequent Exhibit Format books likewise lobbied for the protection of threatened places, though, like
This Is the American Earth
and
In Wildness
, most were less specific in their political aims.