Gallery

Finis Dunaway on the Subtle Spectacle of Fallen Leaves

ELIOT PORTER photographed seasonal change. For over a decade, he traveled through different parts of New England, trying to document the minute variations of natural phenomena, to understand the moment when one season would shade into another, to appreciate the constant flux that marked the time of nature. In 1956, he took this photograph of maple leaves in Tamworth, New Hampshire. Resting on a bed of pine needles, the leaves are similar in design and shape; they seem to have fallen from the same tree. Yet their colors differ, ranging from a greenish-yellow to a rusty brown. The leaves are in different stages of decay. The photograph provides a glimpse of one particular moment, but it also suggests the direction of change. Soon the yellow leaves will turn brown. Soon all of the leaves will decompose.	1
Six years later, this image appeared in "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World," a Sierra Club book that matched Porter's color photographs with quotations from Henry David Thoreau. Organized around the four seasons, the book traced the passage of time in the New England forest. Porter's images—in their style and subject matter—strikingly departed from the approach of Ansel Adams and other Sierra Club photographers. Rather than focusing on the majestic panoramas of the West, he turned to the minute particulars of the East. Rather than celebrating the immense wilderness, complete with towering mountains and thundering waterfalls, he praised a more intimate wildness that offered the subtle spectacle of fallen leaves.1	2
In Wildness became the most popular title in the Sierra Club's Exhibit Format series, a set of coffee table books produced in conjunction with a campaign to enact the Wilderness Bill. This legislation—signed into law in 1964—established a national wilderness system on federal lands and also provided a definition of wilderness "as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Likewise, Sierra Club artists presented nature as sacred and separate; their photographs encouraged audiences to view wilderness as a place where people are visitors who do not remain.2	3
Eliot Porter, Maple Leaves and Pine Needles, Tamworth, New Hampshire, October 3, 1956, P1990.51.4068, dye imbibition print (Kodak dye transfer) c. 1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.
The Sierra Club explicitly linked In Wildness to the wilderness movement, touting Thoreau as a spiritual seer and a political prophet, someone who considered pristine nature his holy text. Yet Porter's photography ventured beyond the usual bounds of the wilderness aesthetic, looking not to monumental scenes, not to places like Yosemite and Yellowstone, but rather to modest settings, to gentle brooks and autumnal leaves. In Wildness combined ecology with abstraction to study patterns of relationship in the natural world. Although the book promoted the cause of wilderness preservation, it also broadened the visual language of environmental politics, portraying fallen leaves as reminders of the awe and wonder found in nature's fragments.	. . .