When he was 11 years old James Porto discovered the black and white photographic process and became utterly obsessed with taking photographs and making prints. Fairly quickly however he became bored with pure photography and would manipulate his photographs in the darkroom using techniques such as solarization, printing multiple negatives onto a single sheet of paper, and doing multiple exposures in the camera. Although he had a reverence for classical photography, he had no compunction to adhere to its strictures. Any amount of manipulation was fair game in the pursuit of a unique image that would excite his artistic sensibilities.
He chose photography as a career path, pursuing a photographic education at Rochester Institute of Technology and afterwards, opening a studio in NYC. His specialization was visual photographic effects and manipulated imagery, primarily in the form of photorealistic composite imagery. A photorealistic composite is a photographic image that results from combining multiple photographs such that the result is indistinguishable from a pure photograph.
It was never his intention to deceive the viewer as the final image was always far enough from reality to be believable, often surreal. However, visually, these images were believable which is what gave them their power.
His early works were all done on film through elaborate darkroom and in-camera processes and evolved rapidly with the advent of Photoshop in the early 1990s. A ten year collaboration with WIRED magazine from its inception positioned his work at the heart of the technological revolution that was unfolding. He enjoyed an exciting, fulfilling, commercial assignment career working for clients such as Absolut, Adidas, AT&T, Bell Helicopters, Epson, IBM, Illford, Kodak, Lockheed, Motorola, Nike, Pepsi, Reebok, Seagrams, Sony, and Texas Instruments. Some of his editorial clients included American Photo, Business Week, ESPN, Fortune, Forbes, Glamour, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, New York, Photo Italia, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Time, and Wired among many others.
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