Minor White
Minor Martin White was an American photographer, theoretician, critic, and educator.
White made photographs of landscapes, people, and abstract subject matter. They showed technical mastery and a strong sense of light and shadow. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in his home. Some of his most compelling images are figure studies of men he taught or with whom he had relationships. He helped start the photography magazine Aperture, considered the only periodical produced for, and by, photographers practicing the medium as a fine art. He served as its editor for many years. White was hailed as one of America's greatest photographers.
Biography
Early life: 1908–1937
White was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was the only child of Charles Henry White, a bookkeeper, and Florence May Martin White, a dressmaker. His first name was the same as his paternal great, great-grandfather. His middle name was his mother's maiden name.During his early years, he spent a great deal of his time with his maternal grandparents and enjoyed playing in their large garden, later influencing his decision to study botany in college. His grandfather, George Martin, an amateur photographer, gave White his first camera in 1915. From 1916 to 1922, White's parents went through a series of separations. During those periods, White and his mother lived with her parents. His parents reconciled in 1922, remaining together until they finally divorced in 1929.
When White graduated from high school, he was aware of his latent homosexuality. In 1927, he wrote about his feelings for men in his diary, which his parents read without his permission. After this, he left home for the summer in what he called a brief crisis period. In the fall, he returned home and entered the University of Minnesota, majoring in botany. His parents never spoke of his homosexuality again.
By 1931, when he should have graduated, he did not meet the requirements for a science degree and left school for a year. During this time, he became very interested in writing and started a life-long personal journal he called "Memorable Fancies." He journaled poems, intimate thoughts about his life and sexuality struggles, excerpts from letters he wrote others, occasional diary-like entries about daily life, and later, extensive notes about his photography. He continued with the journal until 1970, when most of his energy was directed to teaching.
In 1932, White re-entered the university, studied botany and writing, and graduated in 1934. The next semester, he took some graduate botany classes. After six months, he decided he lacked the interest to become botanist. He spent the next two years doing odd jobs and exploring his writing skills. During this time, he created a set of 100 sonnets on the theme of sexual love, his first attempt at grouping his creative output.
Launching a career: 1937–1945
In late 1937, White decided to move to Seattle. He purchased a 35mm Argus camera and hopped a bus to his intended destination. After stopping in Portland, Oregon, he decided to stay there. For the next two and a half years, he lived at the Portland YMCA and explored photography in depth. He taught his first photography class at the YMCA to a small group of young adults. He also joined the Oregon Camera Club and learned how photographers discuss their craft and work.In 1938, White was offered a job as photographer for the Oregon Art Project, funded by the Works Progress Administration. One assignment was to photograph historic buildings in downtown Portland before they were demolished for a new riverfront development. These included Arches of the Dodd Building, which featured a young male prostitute standing in the shadow of the building and pointing at his crotch. During the same period, he took publicity photos for the Portland Civic Theater, documenting their plays and taking portraits of the actors and actresses.
In 1940, White was hired to teach photography at the La Grande Art Center in eastern Oregon. He quickly became immersed in his work, taught classes three days a week, lectured on art to local students, reviewed exhibitions for the local newspaper, and delivered a weekly radio broadcast about activities at the Art Center. In his spare time, he traveled throughout the region taking photographs of the landscape, farms, and small town buildings. He also wrote his first article on photography, "When is Photography Creative?," published two years later in American Photography magazine.
White resigned from the Art Center in late 1941 and returned to Portland, intending to start a commercial photography business. That year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York accepted three of his photographs for inclusion in its "Image of Freedom" exhibition. At the exhibition’s close, the museum purchased all three prints, marking the first time his images entered a public collection. The following year the Portland Art Museum gave White his first one-man show, exhibiting four series of photos he took in eastern Oregon. He wrote in his journal that, with that show, "a period came to a close."
In April 1942, White was drafted into the United States Army and hid his homosexuality. Before departing Portland, he left most of his negatives of historic Portland buildings with the Oregon Historical Society. White spent the first two years of World War II in Hawaii and in Australia. Later, he became Chief of the Divisional Intelligence Branch in the southern Philippines. He rarely photographed during this time, choosing to write poetry and extended verse. Three of his longer poems, "Elegies," "Free Verse for the Freedom of Speech," and "Minor Testament," addressed his war experiences and the bonds of men under extreme conditions. Later, he used text from "Minor Testament" in his photographic sequence Amputations. During the war, White became interested in Catholicism, converting on Easter of 1943.
After the war, White traveled to New York City and enrolled in Columbia University. While in New York, he met and became close friends with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, who worked in the newly formed photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. Through them, White was offered a job as a museum photographer. He spent many hours talking with Nancy Newhall, who he said educated him and strongly influenced his thinking and direction in photography.
Mid-career: 1946–1964
In February 1946, White had the first of several meetings with photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York. White had read Stieglitz's various writings on photography and understood some of his theories. Through their conversations, White came to adopt Stieglitz's theory of equivalence, where the image represents something other than the subject matter, and his use of sequencing pictorial imagery. White wrote in his journal that he expressed his doubt that he was ready to become a serious photographer at one of their meetings. Stieglitz asked him, “Have you ever been in love?" White answered, “Yes.” Stieglitz replied, "Then you can photograph."During this time, White met and became friends with some of the major photographers of the time, including Berenice Abbott, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Harry Callahan. Steichen, who was director of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department, offered White a curatorial position. Instead, White accepted Ansel Adams’s offer to assist him at the newly created photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. White moved to San Francisco in July, living in the same house as Adams for several years. Adams taught White his Zone System method of exposing and developing negatives, which White used extensively in his work. He wrote extensively about it, published a book and taught the exposure and development method as well as the practice of -visualization to his students.
While in San Francisco, White became close friends with Edward Weston in Carmel. For the remainder of his life, Weston had a profound influence on White's photography and philosophy. Later he said "...Stieglitz, Weston and Ansel all gave me exactly what I needed at that time. I took one thing from each: technique from Ansel, the love of nature from Weston, and from Stieglitz the affirmation that I was alive and I could photograph." Over the next several years, White spent a great deal of time photographing at Point Lobos, the site of some of Weston's most famous images, approaching many of the same subjects with entirely different viewpoints and creative purposes.
By mid-1947, White was the primary teacher at CSFA and had developed a three-year course that emphasized personal expressive photography. Over the next six years, he enlisted some of the best photographers of the time as teachers, including Imogen Cunningham, Lisette Model, and Dorothea Lange. During this time, White created his first grouping of photos and text in a non-narrative form, a sequence he called Amputations. Although it was scheduled to be shown at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the exhibition was canceled because White refused to allow the photographs to be shown without text, which included some wording that expressed his ambiguity about America's post-war patriotism.
The next three years were some of White's most creatively prolific. In addition to taking dozens of land- and waterscapes, he took dozens of photographs that evolved into some of his most compelling sequences. Three in particular showed his continuing struggles with his sexuality. Song Without Words, The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors, and Fifth Sequence/Portrait of a Young Man as Actor all depict "the emotional turmoil he feels over his love and desire for men."
In 1949, White purchased a small Zeiss Ikonta camera and began a series of urban street photographs. Over the next four years, he took nearly 6,000 images, all inspired by his newfound interest in the poetry of Walt Whitman. The project, which he called City of Surf, included photographs of San Francisco's Chinatown, the docks, people on the streets, and various parades and fairs around town.
The period of 1951–52 is one of the formative times in White's career. He participated in a Conference on Photography at the Aspen Institute, where the idea of creating a new journal of photography was discussed by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Frederick Sommer and others. Soon after, Aperture magazine was founded by many of these same individuals. White volunteered for and was approved as editor, and the first issue appeared in April 1952. Aperture quickly became one of the most influential magazines about photography, and White remained as editor until 1975.
Near the end of 1952, White's father, from whom he had been estranged for many years, died in Long Beach, California. In 1953, Walter Chappell introduced White to the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of philosophy and divination. White continued to be influenced by and refer to this text throughout the rest of his life. He was especially intrigued by the concepts of yin and yang, in which apparently opposite or contrary forces may be conceived as complementary. Later that same year, a reorganization at CSFS resulted in a reduction in White's classroom time, and he began to think about an employment change. Concurrently, Beaumont Newhall recently had become the curator at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He invited White to work with him as a curatorial assistant. He exhibited September 28 – November 3, 1954, at Limelight Gallery in New York and was included in that gallery's Great Photographs at the end of that year. Over the next three years White organized three themed exhibitions that demonstrated his particular interests: Camera Consciousness, The Pictorial Image and Lyrical and Accurate. In 1955 he joined the faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he taught one day a week.
White's photographic output declined during this time due to his teaching and editorial work, but he continued to produce enough images that by the end of 1955 he had created a new sequence, Sequence 10/Rural Cathedrals, which included landscape images from upstate New York that were shot on regular and infrared film.
By 1955 White was fully engaged in teaching, having been appointed as instructor at the new four-year photography program at RIT as well as conducting classes and workshops at Ohio University and Indiana University. Walter Chappell moved to Rochester later in the year to work at the George Eastman House. Chappell engaged White in long discussions about various Eastern religions and philosophies. White began practicing Zen meditation and adopted a Japanese style of decoration in his house. Over the next two years the discussions between White and Chappell metamorphosed into lengthy discourses about the writing and philosophy of George Gurdjieff. White gradually became an adherent of Gurdjieff's teachings and started to incorporate Gurdjieff's thinking into the design and implementation of his workshops. Gurdjieff's concepts, for White, were not just intellectual exercises but guides to experience, and they greatly influenced much of his approach to teaching and photography throughout the rest of his life.
During this same period White began making his first color images. Although he is better known for his black-and-white photography, he produced many color photographs. His archive contains nearly 9,000 35mm transparencies taken between 1955 and 1975.
In 1959 White mounted a large exhibition of 115 photos of his Sequence 13/Return to the Bud at the George Eastman House. It was his largest exhibition to date. It later traveled to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. White was invited to teach a 10-days', all-expense-paid workshop in Portland to accompany the exhibition. He took advantage of the funding to photograph landscapes and did nature studies across the country. From his experience in Portland he developed the idea for a full-time residential workshop in Rochester in which students would learn through both formal sessions and, following a combination of thinking from Gurdjieff and from Zen, through an understanding gained by the discipline of such tasks as household chores and early morning workouts. He would continue this style of residential teaching until he died. In the early 1960s White studied hypnosis and incorporated the practice into some of his teachings.
White continued to teach extensively both privately and at RIT for the next several years. During this time he traveled across the U.S. in the summers taking photographs along the way. In his journal he referred to himself during this period as "The Wanderer." In 1962 he met Michael Hoffman, who became a friend, colleague and, later editor of Aperture magazine. White later named Hoffman to be the executor of his will.