ArtForum

THE PARADOX OF ELIOT PORTER’S nature photography is the paradox of postwar nature itself: nature at once more and less real than it had been before, more proximate and farther away, more readily fathomable and yet harder to see without state-of-the-art optical prosthetics. Foregoing sweeping landscapes for teeming microcosms, Porter—whose photographs have recently caught the attention of new generations of viewers at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the 2013 Venice Biennale, among other venues—created hyperdetailed images that push verisimilitude past its limits, toward the registers of pop culture, kitsch, and technology. Here, historian JIMENA CANALES assesses the work of an artist who, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, envisioned a biosphere in which there is no such thing as unspoiled wilderness, delving into the contradictions of nature photography in the Anthropocene. Read More >>