Somerset County is rural middle America at a time when people felt free. Kids replaced religion with road movie fantasies and rock and roll. Folk musicians sang about nature and love. Everyone seemed to be coming together in a spiritualized secular transcendentalism. In retrospect, we see innocence. Many feel nostalgia.

The visualization was strong. There is no particular date. 1975 lasted forever in some places and probably came early in others. Mass-produced posters turned photography into popular décor, particularly in bedrooms and other places where people smoked pot. Beauty and feeling were unproblematically cool. The new National Park naturalism came to us in the resonant, deep colors of moss, mountains and majestic fog. Golden sunrise imagery signaled a new day dawning.

Notable among the conventions of the era are the controlled ruptures of the lens flare and the abiding sweetness of the subdued Vaseline haze. Light halos kiss the image. One feels the amateurized presence of the hand-held camera scouring the panorama for signs of life. How quickly it became convention! like the contemporaneous musical affect of controlled reverb kickback. —Only to regain demure harmony in the overall strumming-me-softly stillness of touch.

Porter, a native of Bellefonte, PA and a recent 2006 MFA from Bard/ICP, nails these conventions and amplifies them with startling mastery. They are fluid composites of straight landscape and studio photography, joined flawlessly in his computer—not a stitch out of place. It is as though he stares forward into a mirror that casts back over his shoulder into the sublime origins of credibility in populist marketing-driven photography.