The Color of Wildness – book review

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Porter’s work changed how we look at the outdoors, moving away from the mundane, overrated monochromes of that adept darkroom manipulator Ansel Adams, and seeing the details in all their beauty. And yes, the emphasis in all of Porter’s work is beauty, greatly aided in this case by the well reproduced, large format pictures.

The book includes a fascinating essay by John Rohrbach explaining how Porter moved from black and white to color, despite snide asides from Adams and his set of toadies. It has long been my contention that Adams rejected color owing to his lack of ability in the medium, hiding behind the mistaken belief that if it’s monochrome, it’s Art. And it doesn’t hurt to print on fancy paper using ridiculous assortments of chemicals to emphasize the fact.

The modern version of this idiom is the growing reference by photo sellers to ‘giclee’ prints, as if association with something French must be a good thing. What they mean is that they printed on an Epson ink jet. Making a virtue out of necessity. Sounds sexy and mysterious, it has to be said.

In Porter’s own words ‘I believe that when photographers reject the significance of color, they are denying one of our most precious attributes – color vision.’

Highly recommended.