Eliot Porter's nature photographs have been instrumental in both the growth of the environmental movement throughout the world and the increased acceptance of color photography as an artistic medium. A pioneer in color landscape photography, Porter was committed to the dye transfer process, a complex craft that allows extensive control over image color in all its subtle variations. His photograph of a blue-gray cloud mass over the orange hills of the Sangre de Cristo range is both a literal translation of a particular time and place and an artistic vision, worthy of a Baroque painter, of clouds parting onto blue and white heavens.

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