Shadows and Reflections: Pictorial Photography by Wilbur H. Porterfield
January 19 - May 30, 1999
Pictorialism, a style of photography characterized by soft focus and artistic composition, dominated the realm of serious amateur photography from the early 1890s until the First World War. Hundreds of photographers, both amateur and professional, worked in the new style. Wilbur H. Porterfield (1873-1958) of Buffalo, New York, was a devoted practitioner of pictorialist photography throughout his life.
Porterfield took up photography as an amateur around the turn of the century. He purchased his first camera, a Cycko box model, for $11.75 and joined the Buffalo Camera Club in order to have access to darkroom facilities. Influenced by the Japanese approach to picture composition, Porterfield emphasized subtlety and simplicity. He became a master of the poetic landscape, capturing nuances of tone and eliminating superfluous detail.
In 1921, by which time he had won eighty-seven awards in national and international photographic competitions, he was hired by the Buffalo Courier for the new rotogravure section to produce weekly feature photographs. Porterfield was on the job making pictures for the Buffalo Courier (renamed Buffalo Courier-Express in 1926) until the day of his death at age 85. He was often on the road before 5:00 a.m. in order to capture sunrise at a favorite location on the ground glass of his beloved Graflex. He logged more than 20,000 miles a year, often returning home well after dusk. Throughout his long career, he always developed his own negatives and made his own prints.
For thirty-seven years he was under contract with the paper to produce two pictures a week for a feature titled "As Porterfield Sees It." Many families clipped and saved the weekly offerings, sometimes even framing them. Porterfield's work came to define a sense of "place" and local beauty for Buffalo's populace. His exquisite photographs in the pictorialist tradition appeared regularly in The Sunday [Buffalo] Courier-Express for more than a decade after his death in 1958, revealing the continuing popularity of his poetic pictorial images long after the rise of photographic modernism in the years immediately following the First World War.
Porterfield was married twice, to Ida Miller from 1896 to 1936 and to Lou Bradshaw from 1941 to 1942. He survived both wives and had no children. Known as "the man who made Buffalo beautiful," Porterfield believed that in photography it is what one sees and loves that counts. His legacy is a body of work that reveals his passion for the region he called home.
Shadows and Reflections: Pictorial Photography by Wilbur H. Porterfield was organized by the Palmer Museum of Art and curated by Gillian Greenhill Hannum, Professor, Department of Art History, Manhattanville College. The show will travel to the Burchfield-Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College in the fall of 1999.
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