Eliot Porter (1901-1990) was an American photographer best known for his color nature photographs.

Porter received his first camera as a gift in 1911 and became an avid bird photographer. Porter attended Harvard, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1923 and a medical degree in 1929. He bagan his career as a biochemical researcher at Harvard. Harvard, see Harvard (disambiguation) Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ...

Spurred by support from his brother, the realist painter Fairfield Porter, and introductions in the mid-1930s to the acclaimed artist-photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, he found himself increasingly photographing the northern New England landscape. In 1938 Stieglitz offered to exhibit Porter's black-and-white photographs at his New York City gallery, An American Place. That one-person show placed Porter in the company of such respected photographers as Paul Strand, Adams, and Stieglitz himself. It induced Porter to quit his medical career and take up photography full-time. But rather than continue to work in black and white, Porter almost immediately took up color photography to create more accurate photographs of birds. Expanding his subjects to the beauty and diversity of the natural world, Porter became the first established artist-photographer to work primarily in color. Fairfield Porter (June 10, 1907 - September 18, 1975) was an American painter and art critic. ... Alfred Stieglitz, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1935 Alfred Stieglitz (January 1, 1864_July 13, 1946) was a US-born photographer who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture. ... The Tetons - Snake River (1942) by Ansel Adams Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer born in San Francisco. ... While the states marked in red show the core of New England, the regions cultural influence may cover a greater or lesser area than shown. ... Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow Modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. ... a undated photography from 1905 to 1915 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Color photography was explored throughout the 1800s. ...

Over much of Porter’s career, black-and-white photography continued to set the artistic standard, and he had to fight his colleagues’ prejudices against color photography. In 1962 he gained a major boost when the Sierra Club published "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World." That immensely popular book, featuring color photographs of New England woods with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized photographic book publishing by setting new standards for design and printing and proving the commercial viability of fine art photography books. The Sierra Club is an American environmental organization founded on May 28, 1892 in San Francisco, California by the well-known conservationist John Muir, who became its first president. ... Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher who is famous for Walden (available at wikisource) on living simply with nature and Civil Disobedience (available at wikisource) on resistance to civil government. ...

The success of "In Wildness" (often misquoted as "In Wilderness") set Porter on a lifelong path of creating similar photographic studies of a wide variety of ecologically significant places around the world. Subsequent bodies of work include Glen Canyon, Maine, Baja California, the Galápagos, East Africa, Iceland, and Antarctica. Porter also photographed cultural subjects such as churches and festivals in Mexico, classical Greek sites, ruins in Egypt, and China. The publication of James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) led Porter to review his life’s work in recognition of his own implicit illustration of Gleick’s influential theory. Glen Canyon was carved by two rivers, Colorado and San Juan. ... State nickname: The Pine Tree State Other U.S. States Capital Augusta Largest city Portland Governor John Baldacci (D) Senators Olympia Snowe (R) Susan Collins (R) Official languages None Area 86,542 km² (39th)  - Land 80,005 km²  - Water 11,724 km² (13. ... Baja California is the northernmost state of Mexico; it is mostly located on the northern half of the Baja California peninsula. ... NASA Satellite photo of the Galápagos archipelago. ... East Africa is a region generally considered to include: Djibouti Eritrea Ethiopia Kenya Somalia Tanzania Uganda Burundi, Rwanda, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and Sudan are sometimes considered a part of East Africa. ... The History of Greece extends back to the arrival of the Greeks in Europe some time before 1500 BC, even though there has only been an independent state called Greece since Turkey, Italy and Libya. ... James Gleick is a well-known author, journalist, and essayist, whose writings are generally musings on technology and science, and the people who have contributed to these fields. ... Chaos derives from the Greek Χαος and typically refers to unpredictability. ...

In total, Porter published twenty-five books and was working on several more when he died in 1990. His primary means of color photographic printing was the dye transfer process.