Finis Dunaway | Finis Dunaway on the Subtle Spectacle of Fallen Leaves | Environmental History, 9.4

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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.

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

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

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.

For Porter, the true beauty of nature lay not in what he described as its "most obvious and superficial aspects," but in the "subtle fleeting moods" of the seasons. In contrast to Ansel Adams and most other landscape photographers, Porter rarely focused his camera on the sky. Of all the photographs that appear in In Wildness, the sky is visible in only ten, usually as streaks of blue between trees; it is the dominant subject of only one. By tilting his camera toward the ground, Porter tried to capture the always-changing details of biological life.³

The writer Joseph Wood Krutch, in his introduction to In Wildness, argued that Porter's photography revised the sublime tradition. Often marked by feelings of awe and terror, the sublime emerged as an aesthetic category in the eighteenth century. According to Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, humans could glimpse the divine in nature, but only in particular settings, in landscapes that overwhelmed the spectator, landscapes that made one feel puny and insignificant. But Krutch believed that this perspective was too limited; it encouraged people to ignore the beauty that lay everywhere in the natural world. In Porter's photographs, Krutch found a new form of the sublime—an ecological sublime—that made the familiar seem unfamiliar, that paid attention to the hidden wonders of nature. "What one will find in Porter's pictures," Krutch explained, "is the world of calm beauty at which one must look twice to find the awesomeness which is, nevertheless, there."⁴

As Krutch suggested, Porter wanted to enlarge the typical notion of beauty in nature. To be sure, In Wildness includes photographs of flowers in bloom, lush green plants, and leaves ablaze in autumn colors. But it also shows ferns withering and turning brown, trees stripped of their leaves, flowers losing their petals. "How much beauty in decay!" Thoreau once declared. Inspired by this statement, Porter tried to make art out of decay, to make, he explained, "the sere, brown leaves of winter" seem "as beautiful as the fresh green of spring." Through color photographs, he presented nature as a circle of time, as a place where order and harmony sprang from the unending cycle of change.⁵

This photograph, featured in the autumn section of the book, best illustrates Porter's approach. Next to the image, Porter placed an excerpt from Thoreau's Journal, a passage that evokes the idea that death generates life. "How beautifully they die, making cheerfully their annual contribution to the soil! They fall to rise again. ... They live in the soil whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it." Porter's photograph seems to arrest change, giving permanent form to particular leaves that have particular colors; yet the image, like the quotation, points toward imminent change, toward motion that never ceases.⁶

In Wildness encourages readers to see beauty in places other than Yellowstone or Yosemite, to find aesthetic value in "ordinary" landscapes, including a New Hampshire forest, far from the vast spectacles of the West. Nevertheless, the book reinforces the idea of a peopleless wilderness, of nature as a realm separate from society. Only one of the book's seventy-two photographs provides any evidence of human presence: a picture of birds in a nest, sitting on a wooden beam. Other than this one image, the book contains no sign of human habitation, presenting the natural world as a space of leisure, not of labor. Thoreau's writings, it is important to stress, did not embrace this dualistic vision; describing the springtime thaw in a nearby railroad "cut," he famously wrote in Walden: "There is nothing inorganic." But Porter chose to frame the environment as untouched and unspoiled, as a space that lies outside the fell clutch of humanity.⁷

Porter received numerous letters from people commending and thanking him for his work in In Wildness. Although most of the letter-writers merely offered words of praise, a few expressed their emotional reactions to the book. One fan explained that he had recently moved out of Los Angeles, because the city was a place where people valued the artificial over the natural, where they craved the imitation rather than the real thing. "It is a perverse irony," he wrote, "that the florist shops of my old love, California—are primarily sustained by being the best places in town to buy artfully wrought plastic flowers! There is, in Los Angeles today, a more enduring market for the artificial than for the natural."⁸

Yet the success of In Wildness suggested that there was a growing market for the natural, that more and more Americans were eager to consume the wild. The book was released in October, and many bookstores displayed it in their windows, often with leaves and other emblems of the season. "It's out," one of Porter's friends wrote to him, after seeing the book in a New York City store. "I was so excited I wanted to break in at 10 p.m. They have a whole corner reserved for it with your prints and a lot of real fall leaves strewn about."⁹

In Wildness presented a vision of reality, and the "real" fall leaves must have reinforced this message to customers. But its authenticity had a price. The book sold for twenty-five dollars—ten dollars more than the price of previous books in the Exhibit Format series—a figure in 1962 that would be equivalent to about $145 today. According to Publishers' Weekly, In Wildness was a "lavish gift" book. Sierra Club members were encouraged to buy the book and display it in their homes before the "Christmas rush" began, so they could provide "advance notice" to people who were not involved in the Club. In Wildness became a popular gift item that holiday season, with sales exceeding all expectations. The book went through several reprintings; five years later, it became the first book in the Exhibit Format series to be released in a paperback edition.¹⁰

With In Wildness, the Sierra Club celebrated the idea of pure nature and presented Thoreau as the precursor to the wilderness movement. Yet in photographs such as the image of fallen leaves, Porter enlarged traditional notions of natural beauty and provided the glimmerings of an ecological consciousness. The Sierra Club intended for the book to be a subtle form of propaganda for the wilderness campaign. All those Americans who bought and stared at In Wildness may have indeed become more committed to the protection of wilderness; but they also may have begun to value more deeply and passionately the landscapes closer to home, the places containing the kind of quiet beauty Porter had captured with his camera. The worship of wildness may have encouraged a sense of awe and respect for places other than the wilderness.

Finis Dunaway is an assistant professor of history at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. His first book, Natural Visions: American Environmental Politics Through the Camera's Lens, 1900-1970, will be published by the University of Chicago Press next year.

Notes

^1. "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World," Selections & Photographs by Eliot Porter (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1962). Eliot Porter has received little attention from scholars. For two recent and perceptive essays, see John Rohrbach, "Envisioning the World in Color," and Rebecca Solnit, "Every Corner Is Alive: Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist," both in Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness (New York: Aperture, in association with the Amon Carter Museum, 2001). On the four seasons as a theme in environmental literature, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), chap. 7; for a broad study of this motif in American cultural history, see Michael Kammen, A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

^2. See Michael McCloskey, "The Wilderness Act of 1964: Its Background and Meaning," Oregon Law Review 45 (June 1966): 288-314. The text of the act is reprinted as the appendix to idem, 315-21 (quotation from 315). For an important critique of the wilderness ideal, see William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton,1995), 69-90.

^3. Eliot Porter, Eliot Porter (Boston: New York Graphic Society, in association with the Amon Carter Museum, 1987), 44, 46.

^4. Joseph Wood Krutch, introduction to In Wildness, 13.

^5. Porter, Eliot Porter, 45.

^6. Henry David Thoreau, Journal entry for 16 Oct. 1857, quoted in In Wildness. [The body of the book is not paginated.]

^7. Henry David Thoreau, "Walden," in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government: Authoritative Texts, Journal, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism, ed. William Rossi, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 206. For an important discussion of this theme in "Walden," see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 260-65. For a critique of the ways that American conservationists privilege leisure over labor, see Richard White, "'Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?': Work and Nature," in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground, 171-85; and Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

^8. Ron Ross to Eliot Porter, 7 January 1963, box 45, folder "In Wildness Fan Mail (Part 1) 1962-1971," Eliot Porter Papers, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (hereafter EPP).

^9. Ellen Auerbach to Eliot Porter, 21 October 1962, box 45, folder "In Wildness Fan Mail (Part 1) 1962-1971," EPP. On nature as an object of consumption, see Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

^10. "Sierra Club's Thoreau Book Marks Expanding Program," Publishers' Weekly 182 (1 October 1962): 78; David Brower, " ... And Previews," Sierra Club Bulletin 47 (September 1962): 17. According to the Inflation Calculator maintained by S. Morgan Friedman, twenty-five dollars in 1962 would be equivalent to $144.63 in 2002. See www.westegg.com/inflation.

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