As a photographer, teacher, curator, and editor Minor White (1908–1976) influenced generations of photography professionals through a unique and intensely personal synthesis of esoteric philosophy, varied religious practices, acting modalities, communion with nature, and a psychoanalytic approach to reading photographs that focused on the development of awareness and understanding of the self. Autobiographical in nature, White’s images represent a life-long journey to come to terms with his place within a sacred and profane existence. Throughout his life, White kept a journal in which he recorded his poetry, literary excerpts, photographic field notes, and most significantly feelings and ideas that developed his definition and understanding of self. The journal also enabled him to explore the internal conflict caused by his growing awareness that he was more sexually attracted to men than to women.
Born in Minneapolis, in 1937 White relocated to Oregon, where his nascent teaching philosophies took form in the classes he taught at the YMCA and a small WPA center. His introduction to Catholicism initiated his life-long spiritual journey, a process that profoundly shaped his life and work. He also discovered the book Acting: The First Six Lessons (1933) by Richard Boleslavski, which inspired his own manuscript “Eight Lessons in Photography.” Inducted into the Army in 1942, White made few photographs during the war, but he responded to the emotional and psychological stress of his military service by converting to Catholicism and writing poetry extensively.
After his discharge in 1945, White moved to New York, where he sought out Beaumont Newhall, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and he and his wife Nancy Newhall introduced White to Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. White first saw Weston’s prints in a retrospective exhibition Nancy Newhall had organized at MoMA. For a seminar at Columbia University taught by Meyer Schapiro, White wrote a paper on Weston, applying a psychological approach. White had a transformative meeting with photography visionary Alfred Stieglitz who shared his theory of equivalence and sequencing that used metaphor and the relationship between images as a basis for interpretation. He adopted Stieglitz’s theory immediately and shaped it to his own use over time eventually combining it with concepts based on the teachings of George I. Gurdjieff, a notable spiritual leader in the first half of the twentieth century, that included dance to hone self-awareness.
White moved to San Francisco in 1946 to take a position at the California School of Fine Arts where Adams introduced him to the Zone System, a technical process he had developed to control the photographic print. White recollected: “the whole muddled business of exposure and development fell into place.”1 Now living on the west coast, White established a close relationship with Edward Weston, who encouraged White to pursue his photography through a profound connection with nature, finding inspiration in a focused communion with the landscape before a single exposure was made.
In 1953, White left the CSFA, and after consulting the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of divination, decided to join Beaumont Newhall at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. As editor of Aperture, a photographic publication he established in 1952 with the Newhalls, Adams, and others, White skillfully disseminated the type of self-reflective photography he espoused and made Aperture one of the most influential publications of the 1950s.
For nearly two decades, White held important teaching positions, first at the Rochester Institute of Technology (1956–64) and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1965–1974). His students found him charismatic: “When Minor was before a photography class he was in command.”2 In 1959, during his first summer workshop in Oregon he met
Dr. Arnold Rustin, president of the Society of Hypnosis, and with him studied hypnotic techniques. He made annual trips to the West to conduct workshops, which many regarded as “his greatest contribution to photography.”3 White’s increasingly esoteric teaching methods developed into a powerful synthesis of Stieglitz’s theory of equivalence, Adams’ perfection of technical craft, Weston’s communion with the subject, and a spectrum of spiritual and psychological practices that included hypnotherapy.
White compiled Sequence 17/Out of My Love For You I Will Give You Back Yourself, the portfolio in the Solari Foundation Collection, between 1959 and 1963, as a process of working through his unresolved feelings regarding two of his lovers. One was dancer Drid Williams, whom White met in 1957; she made a cross-country trip with him during the summer of 1962. The other was aspiring photographer William (“Bill”) LaRue, whom he met at a Portland workshop in 1959. Sequence 17 consists of twenty-five images: there are three portraits of Williams and seven of LaRue. He organized the remaining fifteen equivalents into an Introduction and 4 Movements. The series developed through long conversations with Jean Rustin, a psychiatric nurse and wife of Dr. Arnold Rustin, during which they discussed how he might find resolution for his issues of personal identity. It was a period when “people were not very kindly disposed toward individuals who had ambivalence toward their sexual identity.”4
Although White’s sequence cannot be fully appreciated by looking at a single image, this photograph from the Introduction of Sequence 17 represents the qualities that characterize his work during the 1960s, a period when he utilized progressively more abstract images. It demonstrates White’s masterful technical skills; beautifully rendered in black and white tones of gelatin silver, it is primarily a dark ground of drying mud on which a delicate interplay of surface qualities and light creates a metaphor or equivalent for his state of mind. The naturally occurring waves and curls create a sensuous quality, while the gesture of the spiral moves at once toward the center of itself even as it reaches to the edge of the frame, a metaphor for White’s conflicted intimate attractions.
Liz Allen
Minor White, CAPITOL REEF, UTAH, 1961, NO. 2, INTRODUCTION, SEQUENCE 17, 1963, gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 19.1 cm, SOLARI 91.003.004L