Birds of North America: A Personal Selection

Dutton Adult, 1972. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good+. 20x20x20. In Very Good+ condition and Very Good+ dustjacket. Eliot Porter penetrates the images of nature to identify the beauty and behavior of birds in flight or in repose. As always, his concern is for the perfectly composed portrait, never the quick impression. When Porter first photographed birds, the face of North America was largely nature's. In the intervening half century the land has become increasingly urbanized, and today many of our favorite birds are endangered. Between the late 1930s when the first popular color film was invented, and the mid-1970s when art museums began collecting color photography, Eliot Porter made vivid images of landscapes and birds. During that time, his photographs--which are remarkable for their subtlety and vibrancy--encouraged widespread acceptance of color photographs as works of art. Aside from Porter's exquisite dye transfer prints, he became known for his fine art publications. In the 1960s, he began a long-term collaboration with the Sierra Club to produce books focusing on the preservation of natural resources. His first, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (1962), changed notions about what nature photography could be. The second, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (1963), spurred federal reclamation of Western rivers, which ultimately led to passage of the Wilderness Act. In his lifetime, Porter produced twenty-five books, including one that he worked on for much of his life, Birds of North America: A Personal Selection (1972).