Pool in a Brook, Pond Brook near Whiteface, New Hampshire from In Wildness

Date

October 4, 1953

Creator

In the mid-1940s Eliot Porter wanted to publish books of his naturalist color photographs, but the process was expensive and imprecise. Jeannette Klute of Eastman Kodak introduced him to the dye imbibition process, marketed as Dye Transfer printing. The process filters a full-color transparency into three negatives of red, blue and green. These are transformed into enlarged gelatin matrices, that are soaked in magenta, cyan and yellow dyes respectively. The gelatin absorbs—or imbibes—the dyes, which are pressed onto one sheet of paper in precise registration. This image of a woodland brook in autumn was published in his best-selling picture book, titled with a phrase from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World." The print comes from a portfolio of selected original prints, "In Wildness." from Touchstones of the Twentieth Century: A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame (exhibition, 2020-21)