Forever Wild

An association between black-and-white film and fine art photography persisted long after colour photography became commonplace among amateurs. Despite this association, Eliot Porter took up colour photography in the 1940s and achieved widespread recognition for his fine art photography featuring American landscapes and animal life. 

In the 1970s, when artist Sherrie Levine began rephotographing fine art photographs, she chose Porter’s colourful landscapes as one of her subjects—demonstrating, as Abigail Solomon-Godeau pointed out—that Porter was among the “canonized masters of photographic modernism” at the time (127). In her essay “Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics," Solomon-Godeau goes on to explain:

[Levine’s] selection of stolen images was anything but arbitrary; always the work of canonized male photographers, the contents and codes of these purloined images were chosen for their ideological density (the classical nude, the beauty of nature, the poor of the Great Depression) and then subjected to a demystifying scrutiny. (128)