“There’s no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I’m always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don’t give a damn how it got made.” – Minor White
Minor White, fine art photographer, educator and critic was also an editor. He created Aperture the photography magazine. His other founders of the publication included Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall.
Service to country
Early in his photographic career, Minor White photographed for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) from 1938 to 1939. He joined the Army, serving in the infantry and fighting in the Philippines during World War II. He earned the Bronze Star.
Spiritual explorer
After the war, Minor White studied Roman Catholicism, the I Ching, Gurdjieff, and astrology. He believed that taking photographs and looking at them were spiritual, intellectual acts. He felt that a photograph can express what it takes to make while people looking at a picture create feelings and emotions for themselves.
Andy Grundberg writing in the New York Times notes that as a critic, “[his} views were unabashedly psychoanalytic and mystical, he shaped the esthetic climate of postwar photography in much the same way that Alfred Stieglitz had shaped the medium before the war.”
“Like Stieglitz, White believed that the essence of photography’s claim to being an art lay in its metaphoric capability.” Grundberg continues, writing, “That is, he felt that photographic representation was inherently symbolic, and that camera images revealed not only their subjects but also the inner lives of their makers. This tenet, which was fundamental to photography’s version of modernism, has since been replaced by the post-modernist notion that photographs reveal cultural codes, not personal truths.”
Abstract photography
Minor White’s vision seems real and contemporary. It also touches on abstraction. The top row of the opening photo has three examples. From left to right: Surf, Vertical, San Mateo County, 1947, Capitol Reef, Utah, 1967, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester, 1958, and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, 1957.
Surf, Vertical is an overhead view that Minor White turned on its side to make the print appear more abstract.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping looks like a crusty snail shell. It is really a photograph of a junked water tank.
Getty Museum exhibit
Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit was exhibited in 2014 at Getty Center. Show curator Paul Martineau talking about the photographer said, “He worked very hard his entire life. He was practically living at poverty levels until the very end of his life. He was completely committed in mind, body and soul to living a life in photography.”
Steichen, Adams and Weston
“When Minor visited Alfred Stieglitz in New York, he still had many questions about his own direction and whether or not he could be truly a great photographer,” Martineau says. “Stieglitz asked him the question: Have you ever been in love? And Minor replied: Yes I have. And Stieglitz replied: Then you can be a photographer.”
Minor White had other influences: Ansel Adams for his landscapes and Edward Weston for his photographs of nudes, shells and vegetables.
Torment
Minor White was talking to himself through the photographs he created. He used them to look inwards. His male nudes reveal some of his torment (opening photo, bottom row, third and fourth images.)
“His struggle with his homosexuality was a key factor in his work,” Martineau explains. “Throughout his entire career, he remained closeted. He had to. He was teaching in various university art programs, and if someone had found out he could’ve lost his source of livelihood, so it was very serious.”
Sources: New York Times, NPR.
On Photography features inspirational photographers.
Before today I had seen only a few examples of Minor white’s work. I find some elicit the response of wanting to know what was on the man’s mind when He captured and developed the image. I would hope that a few more of mine would elicit similar responses, but am confident that with my extremely late start in this art that few might be thought to compare with the great work I’m seeing. None-the less, I’m gratified to find still another great artist who worked so effectively in abstract are through the lens to paper.