Local Lens shines a light on the people who make our community unique, one mini profile at a time.
Andy Porter fell in love with the Cascades before he ever visited western Washington. He saw a story in National Geographic about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and started making plans with some friends to hitchhike across the country to do the trail. It was the seventies, and there were no guidebooks, no internet, and you couldn’t even get a single map of the complete trail. He ordered maps for each section, and as he looked closely at the North Cascades, he started to become more and more enamored with the remoteness and the names of the places he only imagined. When he narrowed it down to Oregon and Washington, he didn’t know it, but he was exploring his future home.
Fast forward many years later and Andy is a well-known local photographer whose work expresses the beauty he sees in the isolated wilderness that is the North Cascades. Andy has always found peace and solace in nature and those feelings are conveyed in the scenes he catches.
A long-time Skagit Valley resident, Andy is a relatively new resident of La Conner, where he purchased a house and commercial building on Morris Street because it offered him the opportunity to have his own gallery. And that gallery reflects Andy’s cheerful disposition and love of the natural world. Painted in bright blue and yellow, decorated with blooming flowers and selected prints, it invites you to step into his world through the welcoming yellow door. Andy has always stayed busy, teaching night sky photography at North Cascades Institute, teaching photography at Burlington-Edison High School, as well as shooting his own work. Right now, he opens his gallery on weekends, but he is making plans to back off from other obligations and expand his gallery hours and offerings.
Visit Andy Porter Photography at 306 Morris St., La Conner.
Learn more about Andy at https://andyporterimages.com/.
Who should we feature in our next Local Lens? Email us at newstips@laconnercommunitynews.org.
Nancy K. Crowell: nancy@laconnercommunitynews.org. Nancy is a photographer, photo editor, and a general assignment reporter for La Conner Community News. Nancy has also been a Master Gardener for 10 years.
