Minor White (photographer)

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Minor Martin White (born July 9, 1908 in Minneapolis , Minnesota , † June 24, 1976 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was a well-known American photographer , influential teacher , intellectual and spiritual " guru " of an entire generation of photographers, who was particularly responsible for the distribution and consistent further development of the symbolist aesthetics of his compatriot Alfred Stieglitz (which he called "equivalents").

Life

Minor White's photographic interest arose while studying botany at the University of Minnesota when he was making black and white photomicrographs of plants. The abstract formal and emotional expressiveness of the plants, robbed of their natural context, fascinated him more and more. They formed the core of his later work with the camera, which for him is an image tool controlled by the photographer's inner fantasy and emotional world and whose task is to transform this inner world into objects of the real, visible world ("equivalents") capture and symbolize photographically.

From 1937 White began to take photos professionally. He first worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Portland (Oregon) . While most of the photographers who worked for the WPA were primarily concerned with documentary photography, White preferred a more personal approach. Many of these photographic works were shown in one of the first major photo exhibitions of the Museum of Modern Art in 1941 .

White served in the US Army during World War II . In 1945 he moved to New York , where he made friends with the influential photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz brought him to develop his own, unmistakable style and made him aware of the expressive possibilities of serial photography . In the following years, White arranged his photographic works with accompanying texts in order to create different moods, emotions and associations in the viewer. He went beyond the expressive possibilities of conventional still photography . He also adopted the concept of “equivalents” from Stieglitz, the correspondences in which a photographic image is also intended to be a visual metaphor .

In 1946 White moved to San Francisco , where he worked with Ansel Adams , who introduced him to the zone system . At that time, Adams was head of the newly established photography department at the California School of Fine Arts , now the San Francisco Art Institute , but gave up teaching due to lack of time and chose White as his successor. At this time, White became friends with Edward Weston , who inspired him to use realistic imagery. White also dealt with spiritual content in his photography and adopted ideas from the Zen philosophy, which enriched his work with a mysterious aspect.

In 1952 White went back to New York, where he was editor of the photo magazine Aperture , which was founded that same year . White published the magazine until 1975. From 1953 to 1957 he was also the editor of Image , the in-house magazine of the George Eastman House in Rochester , New York , for which he was the curator .

In the late 1950s, White traveled across the United States. He began experimenting with color photography in the early 1960s . In 1965 he settled in Cambridge , Massachusetts , where he became professor of creative photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1969 he published Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations , in which he devoted himself to series recording, one of his best-known illustrated books.

In 1978, Minor White: Rites and Passages appeared posthumously, with excerpts from White's diaries and letters and a biographical essay by James Baker Hall. Abe Frajndlich is one of the best known photographers trained by White .

literature

Publications by and with Minor White

  • 1969: Mirrors Messages Manifestations . New edition by Aperture, New York 1989, ISBN 0-89381-334-6 .
  • 1974: Photography in America . Edited by Robert Doty, Introduction by Minor White; Exhibition catalog Whitney Museum of American Art , Random House, New York 1974, ISBN 0-394-49355-9 .
  • 1978: Minor White: Rites and Passages (Aperture Monograph) with an essay by James Baker Hall; New edition by Aperture, New York 1997, ISBN 0-89381-490-3 .

Monographs

  • Stephanie Comer, Jeff Gunderson, Deborah Klochko: The Moment of Seeing - Minor White at the California School of Fine Arts . Chronicle Books, ISBN 0-8118-5468-X .
  • Nathan Lyons: Eye Mind Spirit - The Enduring Legacy of Minor White . Howard Greenberg Gallery, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9748863-0-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Ansel Adams: Autobiography , 1984; German 1985 Christian Verlag, Munich, p. 284