Minor White in his Jackson Street studio loft in San Francisco, Unknown Photographer, c. 1951.
Minor Martin White (July 9,
1908 – June 24, 1976) was a photographer, theoretician, critic, and educator
who 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.
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 helped start, and for many years was editor
of, the photography magazine Aperture.
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."
While rocks were
photographed, the subject of the sequence is not rocks; while symbols seem to
appear, they are barely pointers to significance. The meaning appears in the
mood they raise in the beholder; and the flow of the sequence eddies in the river
of his associations as he passes from picture to picture. The rocks are only
the objects upon which the significance is spread like sheets on the ground to
dry.
In the mid-1940s White
began to articulate a philosophy about the importance of how his photographs
are presented to the viewer. He was influenced initially by Stieglitz, who in
his teaching emphasized that photographs shown in a structured content may
support each other and may create a total statement that is more complex and meaningful
that the individual images by themselves. When White began working as a
photographer at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 he became friends with Nancy
Newhall, who was organizing a retrospective of Edward Weston's photographs for
the museum. Newhall had a gift for creating highly distinct groupings of
images, and White said later that her installation of the Weston exhibit was a
Two iterations of Power
Spot (1970). White flipped the negative vertically between the first and the
second version.
Later, as he became more
interested in anthropology and myth, he began to experiment with how individual
images influenced a viewer by how they were presented. In a work he called
Totemic Sequence, composed of 10 photographs, he included the same image as
both the opening and the closing picture. The last picture is the first picture
turned upside down. White felt that this change illustrated the simultaneous
reality and unreality in a photograph. The title he gave to the first image was
"Power Spot."
