The Greek World

Fülszöveg

THE GREEK WORLD ELIOT PORTER
Text by Peter Levi
Classical Greece lives in our imagination as no other ancient place. Helen remains high on the battlement of windy Ti-oy, long after Schliemann's faithful evacuation of Priam's city; the Parthenon continues to offer the same life-giving impression to today's viewer as it has since the fifth century b.c.
In this magnificent volume the continuous attractions of Greece—from Bronze Age Crete to the coming of Alexander—are revealed by Eliot Porter, one of the world's premier color photographers, who began focusing his large-format camera on the remnants of Greek culture in 1967. Working with Mr. Porter, Peter Levi, poet and classical scholar, allows the reader to make connections between Homeric myth and history going back to the third millennium b.c. Eighty-six powerful four-color photographs capture a magical world, with its blend of natural and man-made beauty Along the way one learns how much our world has inherited from the early... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THE GREEK WORLD ELIOT PORTER
Text by Peter Levi
Classical Greece lives in our imagination as no other ancient place. Helen remains high on the battlement of windy Ti-oy, long after Schliemann's faithful evacuation of Priam's city; the Parthenon continues to offer the same life-giving impression to today's viewer as it has since the fifth century b.c.
In this magnificent volume the continuous attractions of Greece—from Bronze Age Crete to the coming of Alexander—are revealed by Eliot Porter, one of the world's premier color photographers, who began focusing his large-format camera on the remnants of Greek culture in 1967. Working with Mr. Porter, Peter Levi, poet and classical scholar, allows the reader to make connections between Homeric myth and history going back to the third millennium b.c. Eighty-six powerful four-color photographs capture a magical world, with its blend of natural and man-made beauty Along the way one learns how much our world has inherited from the early Greeks and understands the profound truths of Greek drama, the bittersweetness of fifth-century Athenian democracy, the glories and horrors of war, the elegant simplicity of the Greek architectural orders, the earnest competition of the games at Olympia, even the intellectual climate that produced Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, it is remarkable what a strong sense of that vanished world, a world substantially dissolved into our own history and our own bloodstream, is still to be found in Greece today
"My first encounter with Eliot Porter's photographs felt like a slow, cold dawn," writes Peter Levi. "They are perfectly still and silent in almost all their subject matter They have great visual beauty great attraction of color and composition. Of course, his work has always had that, and also a dramatic quality, but here the dramatic sense is combined with time itself, as if the landscape and the ruins were his own expression. This is a remarkable and, 1 think, subtle and passionate view of Greece. Mr. Porter's Greek
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photography began just early enough to capture sites, especially in the Parthenon, before they were destroyed or closed to public view. Further, 1 submit that no finer, more coherent set of photographs of these subjects has ever been taken. These places have recovered in Eliot Porter's work a sharpness and a strength that had been lost since the fine engravings of the eighteenth century. They have regained their solitude and their intensity."
By combining words and pictures The Greek World conveys some three thousand years of civilization beginning with Crete and the palace reconstruction at Knossos, ranging over Agamemnon's Mycenae, the marble temples and stone theaters at Segesta and Syracuse, Delphi, Olympia and Ionian Ephesus to the elegant simplicity of the Acropolis at Athens.
Eliot Porter was honored in 1979-80 by the first one-man exhibition of color photographs ever presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Mr Porter gave the Alfred Stieglitz Memorial Lecture at Princeton in 1977. His first exhibition was at Stieglitz's own gallery more than forty years ago when Eliot Porter was teaching at the Harvard Medical School. Mr Porter's books include: In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, Forever Wild: The Adirondacks, Down the Colorado, Birds of North America, The Tree Where Man Was Bom, Antarctica, and intimate Landscapes.
Peter Levi, a distinguished poet, writer and former Jesuit, teaches classics at Oxford when not on extended trips to Greece.
Jacket design by Nancy Etheredge Jacl<et printed in Italy Vissza