FINIS DUNAWAY ON THE SUBTLE SPECTACLE OF FALLEN LEAVES

Environmental History, Oct 2004 by Dunaway, Finis

ELIOT PORTER photographed seasonal change. For over a decade, he traveled through different parts of New England, try ing to document the mi nute 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. Ratherthan focusingon 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 t hat 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

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. Accordingto 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 turningbrown, trees stripped of their leaves, flowers losingtheir 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