Eliot Porter's photographs comprising his Antarctica (1978) depict a "timeless" and composed Antarctic landscape, betraying no sign of the human intervention that nevertheless motivates and frames the album.

Porter helped create the Sierra Club aesthetic, which was also a complex strategy of promoting conservation in the U.S. post-War era. Advocates sought to curb development in Yellowstone Park, but advocacy required promotion. The photographic school that developed to capture and control the image of the western landscape created dramatic and anachronistic images of seemingly untouched nature.

Porter aimed to preserve the Antarctic wilderness against the inevitability of capitalist development through the power of his lush, full color coffee table book. But bringing the little known, non-nationalized Antarctic to a U.S. audience as wilderness, and as a handsome album of carefully framed photographs, also heavily marked the Antarctic as an object of U.S. national concern, and possibly of ownership.