Korling migrated to Chicago at age nineteen to study North American flora and fauna and photograph it on his folding Kodak Brownie camera.
A friend encouraged Korling to show his pictures to a Chicago ad agency art director, and his career as a commercial photographer was launched.
From the 1920s through the 1950s Korling was extensively published in Fortune and Life magazines and did annual reports for major companies; Container Corporation of America, Dow Chemical, and Standard Oil of California.
[5][6][7] From the late 1940s to 1962 he was granted access to RR Donnelley's Chicago and Crawfordsville facilities, producing more than 300 images for them at a time when the company carefully guarded its innovations.
He was favoured for his ability in staging and capturing the essential steps in manufacturing processes, often in the one image, since he rarely made more than one shot at each location.
This book, as will each one in the series, Wild Plants In Flower, aims to provoke an appreciation for what remains, whether you can recollect what once was or not.” In Chicago on 20 acres near Dundee, he designed an arboretum frequently used for his nature studies.