Jess Orndorff Style Assignment

NATURE’S CHAOS

Photographs by Elliot Porter 

Elliot Porter, born in 1901 in Chicago, always had a love for photography. Elliot has photographed many aspects of nature, ranging from river channels photographed from above to close-ups of bark from a tree. I would say the style of his photographs include capturing the shapes, colors, and textures of nature. He has photographed several soft, edgeless clouds and then others are rigid mountains. He often only shows close ups of nature and chooses not to show anything else in the background. One photograph shows the flow of lava but only this. There is no volcano or sky included. Another photograph is of the bark on a tree. Again, this photo is very close up and only includes the way that the bark is shaped. You cannot see the tree as a whole or where exactly this close up of the bark came from on the tree. I believe this tool of highlighting the fine details of a bigger object is what makes his photographs “his”. Some of his photographs make you really have to look for what exactly it is, since some of them are so close up. There is also a lot of contrast between light and dark in many of his photographs which accentuates the details of the photos. In summary, all of his photographs consisted of different parts nature, all in color and all excluding anything artificial or man-made.