Minor White

Windowsill Daydreaming 1958


Barn and Clouds in the Vicinity of Naples and Dansville, New York 1955


Road and Poplar Trees 1955


Warehouse Area, San Francisco 1949


Minor White (1908-1977) was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. White studied botany and poetry before finding his calling in the realm of textural photography. He is best know for his intense commitment to his photography and his vision, often incorporating ideas of the spiritual and Other into his work through the use of light and composition. From 1938 to 1939, White worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration in Oregon before serving as an infantryman in the Philippines from 1942-1945. In 1945, White studied under Edward Weston before working on a tenure with Alfred Stieglitz. During this time, White's photographs became to reflect on the spiritual issues inherent within the world drawing inspiration from Roman Catholicism, Zen Buddhism and mysticism. In 1945, White moved to New York City where he studied at the University of Columbia. In 1946, while working as an assistant to Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts, he took part in co-founding 'Aperture' with other notable photographers such as Adams, Dorthea Lange, and Beaumont Newhall. White continued to work for 'Aperture', taking over as editor, and eventually became professor of photography at MIT, where he served until his death in 1976.

White's photographic style was given definition by those he worked under. From Weston and Stieglitz, White learned the value of realism and tonal beauty, as well as the expressive potential of the sequence and the equivalent (a photographic image viewed as a visual metaphor). From Adams, White utilized Adams' zone system, a method of visualizing how a scene or object being photographed will eventually appear in the final print. Using these methods, coupled with White's faithfulness to his work with tones and textures, White became one of the leading abstract photographers to the mid-twentieth century. White's use of equivalents led his photographs to hold heavy spiritual connotations. His use of "recognition" (the mirroring of something inside of viewer) brings a distinctly religious context to his art. Throughout his life, White was on a spiritual search for peace and simplicity, drawing heavily on the spiritual aspect of reality as shown through Roman Catholicism, mysticism, and Zen Buddhism as a means of battling inner demons and creating a sense of understanding of his own social a priori. Through the photographic medium, White was able to accomplish an different understanding of the natural world, bringing a lyrical passion to the images that have inspired his students and various other photographers over the course of time.

I was drawn to Minor White by his incredible sense of finding the Other in everyday situations. His use of Spirit, as well as the metaphorical ideas found within his work, is similar to what I wish to accomplish with my own work and my own understanding of how the spiritual is incorporated into life and what it means as a way to understand Reality both as it is given and as it socially defined. I find White's images incredibly moving in the way that their simplicity brings out the complex layers of how the world functions. His work raises questions of the ideas of who and what Spirit is within the world at large and how that force acts upon life.

Jacob Riis

Ludlow Street Cellar (1895)

Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement - 'Five Cents Spot' (1889)

The Baby's Playground (1895)

Poverty Gappers Playing (1892)

The Trench in Potter's Field (1891)

Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters (1889)

Dockrats in Quarters (1887)

A 'Downtown Morgue' (1887)

Bandit's Roost (1887)

The Tramp (1887)

Jacob Riis – The Original Muckraker
Jacob Riis, born in 1849, was third of fifteen children to Ribe, Denmark’s schoolteacher and newspaper editor, Niels Riis. From an early age, it seems that Riis was concerned with the well being of others less fortunate. It is reported that at age 12, Riis donated all of his Christmas money to a poorer family in town. At age 16, Riis was sent to Copenhagen to find work as a carpenter, and at age 21, immigrated to New York City in search of the same work.
Upon his arrival in New York, Riis found the city overpopulated with migrant workers just like him, and was forced to live in government operated poor houses. Eventually Riis found work. However, his work was not as a carpenter, but as a police reporter, first for the New York Evening Sun in 1874 and later for the New York Tribune in 1877. The job of a police reporter required Riis to work in crime ridden, overpopulated, slums. This is when Riis began photographing. He was one of the first to use flash powder in order to photograph the conditions at night. In 1888, the New York Sun published “Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process.” Riis’s most famous work, a photographic essay on the conditions of the city entitled “How the other Half Lives” was published a year later in Scribner’s Magazine. This essay is considered to be influential in then Commissioner of Police, Theodore Roosevelt’s, decision to close New York’s poor houses. Roosevelt himself apparently coined the term most frequently associated with Riis, “muckraking journalist.”
I became interested in Riis initially because I found his photographs to be moving and purposeful. The details are vivid and the subject matter transported me to another time. I have always been fascinated with city life in this time period and Riis’s photographs are able to bring me there. However, after researching Riis further I became fascinated with him as a person. It is amazing to me that he was able to make such a tangible difference with photographs.
In today’s world, where the conditions Riis photographed have become history, I wonder what kind of statement his photographs makes. I also wonder how this type of “muckraking” photography can function now, and what type of topics it can make statements about.

Peter Yen
Weegee
9/25/08

Earning his nickname “Weegee” for appearing at crime scenes before other photojournalist and sometimes the police. Arthur Fellig had a sixth sense of being at the right place at the right time to take some of the most powerful photographs in American photographic history. From the late 1920’s to the early 1950’s Weegee’s concentration of work was the gritty vice of the New York street scene. While other photographers were shooting skyscrapers, Weegee immersed himself in the life of crime, murder, tenement fires, and boisterous crowds. Yet, no one would have predicted this from the young Austrian immigrant who grew up doing an assortment of odd jobs just to survive.
One gangster’s work Weegee seemed particularly interested in was of Lucky Luciano. Once Weegee became a freelance photographer he frequently recorded the hits done by Luciano and the public’s reactions. This had a profound impact in his book “Naked City” as some of the reactions were some of his most famous photographs. This book according to Anthony Lee “was the most widely known single-volume visual representation of the city,” elevating Weegee from a general freelance photographer into a fine artist.
The outcome of his book led to several exhibitions of his work including two shows at the MOMA. From the 1950’s to the 1960’s he took advantage of his recent fame from “Naked City” to pursue an acting and filmmaking career. Unfortunately, his attempt at stardom failed to blossom and was forced to return to photography. But he never again photographed crime scenes. Weegee died in 1968 leaving behind him over 20,000 photographs that eventually went to the International Center of Photography in midtown New York.
Other than Weegee’s ability to draw out the tones of black and white very well to compliment every image and that the subject material is simple but powerful. What drew me to the images was that feeling of rubbernecking. I know these images are disturbing because they are real people that were murdered and I should look at them, but I couldn’t look away. They are badass.
My question to him would be why was he personally drawn to these scenes of mayhem and melancholy and why did he photograph these bodies at the angels he chose to shoot from?

E.J. Bellocq, born to a wealthy Creole family in the French Quarter of New Orleans, was a man that very few knew anything about. He was a professional photographer that made his living shooting for local companies and most frequently photographed large ships. However, it was not until after his death in 1949 that the glass plates were discovered in his desk drawer. There were nearly 100 of them, and all in varying degrees of decay. No one is sure as to whether this was a commercial project or not, but most assume that they were not, due to the comfortable and relaxed nature of the images. And while there is no documentation of the Storyville series, one would speculate that this was a personal project developed out of Bellocq's love and fascination of women within the red light district of New Orleans. As I said above, there is an unmistakable familiarity between Bellocq and his subjects. However, what exactly drove him to make this series will never be known.
I found myself drawn to Bellocq's work because of the raw, natural, and textured qualities of both the images and the plates. I believe that he respected these women and praised their courage to break the social mold. Prostitution, and especially documenting it was a very taboo thing to do in this time period (approx. 1901-1915). It was almost as if he wanted to be apart of their world and had no other medium to do so. I also enjoyed his mysteriousness of some of these photos where the women's faces had been intentionally scratched out as to protect their identity. Bellocq managed to capture the raw beauty of these women and what they represented while shooting them in both their homes and brothels. He brought to life their humanness when I'm sure that society was in a constant battle to strip this from them. Something else that needs to be noted on a pure aesthetic note are the glass plates themselves and the cracks and chips that run through them in a way that only enhances the subjects. They really compliment each other in a beautiful fashion.
This series raises a few questions more about Bellocq than it does society. We know today that photographing nudes is still taboo to most but that it is definitely being more accepted now than it was then. So the questions I have come from the mysterious relationship that Bellocq held with these women. Was he a frequent customer or did he just enjoy their world and physical beauty? Was it a documentary or more about the human form in the nude? These are questions we will never have the answers for yet are still worth posing.

Post Your Presentations

For you B&W LF presentations, include your ten images on this blog together with four paragraphs that:
~introduce the photographer
~explore the photographers concerns, inspiration, purpose in photographing
~discuss what drew you to this image maker and interpret the meaning of the work
~point out a few questions the work raises, or question you have about the work

Each of you should make comments on three of the six blogs your fellows post.