MINOR WHITE
was an American photographer, theoretician, critic, and educator born
on this date (d: 1976). He combined an intense interest in how people
viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided
by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies. Starting in
Oregon in 1937 and continuing until he died in 1976, White made
thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes,
people, and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery
and a strong visual sense of light and shadow. He taught many classes,
workshops, and retreats on photography at the California School of Fine
Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, other schools, and in his own home. He lived much of his
life as a closeted gay man, afraid to express himself publicly for fear
of loss of his teaching jobs, and some of his most compelling images are
figure studies of men whom he taught or with whom he had relationships.
He helped start, and for many years was editor of, the photography
magazine Aperture. After his death in 1976, White was hailed as one of America's greatest photographers.
White took up
photography while very young but set it aside for a number of years to
study botany and, later, poetry. He began to photograph seriously in
1937. His early years as a photographer were spent working for the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) in Portland, Ore. Many WPA photographers
were chiefly concerned with documentation; White, however, preferred a
more personal approach. Several of his photographs were included in a
show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1941.
White served in
the U.S. Army during WWII, and in 1945 he moved to New York City, where
he became part of a circle of friends that included the influential
photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz His contact with
Stieglitz helped him discover his own distinctive style. From Stieglitz
he learned the expressive potential of the sequence, a group of
photographs presented as a unit. White would present his work in such
units along with text, creating arrangements that he hoped would inspire
different moods, emotions, and associations in the viewer, moving
beyond the conventional expressive possibilities of still photography.
White also learned from Stieglitz the idea of the “equivalent,” or a
photographic image intended as a visual metaphor for a state of being.
Both in his photographs and in his writing, White became the foremost
exponent of the sequence and the equivalent.
White was greatly
influenced by Stieglitz's concept of "equivalence," which White
interpreted as allowing photographs to represent more than their subject
matter. He wrote "when a photograph functions as an Equivalent, the
photograph is at once a record of something in front of the camera and
simultaneously a spontaneous symbol. (A 'spontaneous symbol' is one
which develops automatically to fill the need of the moment. A
photograph of the bark of a tree, for example, may suddenly touch off a
corresponding feeling of roughness of character within an individual.)"
In his later life
he often made photographs of rocks, surf, wood and other natural
objects that were isolated from their context, so that they became
abstract forms. He intended these to be interpreted by the viewer as
something more than what they actually present. According to White,
"When a photographer presents us with what to him is an Equivalent, he
is telling us in effect, 'I had a feeling about something and here is my
metaphor of that feeling.'...What really happened is that he recognized
an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an
image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a
specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself.
Among his best-known books are two collections, Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations (1969), which features some of his sequences, and Minor White: Rites and Passages (1978), with excerpts from his diaries and letters and a biographical essay by James Baker Hall.
From 1965 to
1974 White taught photography at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Boston. In 1968 he photographed in Maine and Vermont, United
States and Nova Scotia, Canada. In 1973-1974 White photographed in
Lima, Peru and Europe. He died June 24, 1976.
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