Eliot Porter, Big Sur, and iconic images:
At what point does a copy of a famous image become visual plagiarism? Or does it?
posted 6-25-2011 - 6:45 pm

 
There are some images that make such a deep impression on us that they stay with us for the rest of our lives. Often, that persistent image may be of a historical event or where we were and what we saw at that moment. If you’re old enough, you probably remember where you were when you learned that JFK or Martin Luther King was shot, when Nixon resigned, when men walked on the moon, when the twin towers came crashing down in New York, or when the Challenger or Columbia space shuttles exploded. In every one of those instances, I have a specific image of the place that I was in and what my surroundings were like – a Policywonk's-eye view, if you will – and when I recall one of those events, it’s always the same image that comes to my mind’s eye first, unbidden.

An image can also become fixed in the mind because of the meaning it has to you personally. But sometimes, an image sticks with you simply because it so accurately sums up precisely what it represents that it becomes the definitive image for thousands, if not millions or billions, of people.

So it is for me with a photo of the Big Sur coastline by the late Eliot Porter: Mist on Coast, Big Sur, California, September 25, 1975. It is a view of the ragged, stepped coastline iced with layers of fog, looking south, as if pulled out of time, and it has become the definitive image of Big Sur, iconic because it sums up in a way that words fail the very essence of the place. From the very first moment I saw it, I fell in love with that image, both stark and soft, with its power and its subtlety, and with the place it represented. It conveyed meaning in ways that I cannot define and became indelible in my mind. There was something about it that simply pulled at me. It continues to do so even today.