Eliot Porter
Waterfall, Hidden Passage, Glen Canyon, Utah
September 4, 1962
Dye transfer print
10 ½ x 8 ¼ inches
Gift of the Eliot Porter Estate, 1993
1993.3.12
© 1990 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Eliot Porter was elected to the board of directors of the Sierra Club in 1965, and served with Ansel Adams under club president David Brower. After their initial collaboration on the book In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, Porter did a second publication with the Sierra Club, in 1963. The artist had already made several visits with friends to Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, a site proposed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for a dam to create hydroelectric power. Porter was opposed to building the dam and made numerous trips to the canyon, to experience it as completely as possible before it was submerged under what is today Lake Powell. Not everyone, however, objected to the dam and the recreational lake it created. Floyd Dominy, who oversaw the Bureau of Reclamation project, put together his own publication of photographs and poems, in 1965, to present a positive view of Lake Powell and to advocate for future dams on the Colorado River.