Art and the environment
PORTER, Eliot (photographer). Summer Island, Penobscot Country. San Francisco, Sierra Club, [1966].
Folio. Original buckram with illustrated dust-wrappers with printed text and illustrations on verso, map endpapers; pp. 200, highly illustrated in colour and black and white; wrapper price-clipped and with repaired flaw to lower cover, gift inscription to front fly-leaf, otherwise a very good copy.
First edition of this stunning photobook on the Island in Maine. 'Eliot Porter, one of the foremost camera artists of the 20th century, began his affectionate and engaging portrait of Great Spruce Head Island. Published a half century ago, Summer Island: Penobscot Country remains a remarkable homage, in word and image, to one of Maine’s “golden isles.” … Encouraged by his brother, the painter Fairfield Porter, and inspired by renowned landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Eliot developed into a formidable creator of black-and-white images. Over time he moved from the Brownie to a Leica to a Linhof large-format camera. When legendary art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz gave him a solo show at his gallery An American Place in New York City in 1939, Porter’s direction was confirmed: he gave himself fully to photography. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941 to photograph birds sealed the deal … Summer Island was one of a series of large-format, ground-breaking color photography books produced by the Sierra Club in the 1960s that made the connection between art and the environment' (Carl Little in maineboats.com, issue 14, online).
#2119552