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.