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Minor White - Equivalents |
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In 1946 Minor White went
back from New York to the West coast, staying with Ansel Adams and
teaching with him in San Francisco. White was one of the first to
understand the Zone System that Adams was developing, and both taught it
to the students and wrote a guide to it. While in California he also took
the opportunity to visit and study further with Edward Weston. White's contact with Stieglitz awakened his interest in the metaphorical power of the photograph, and in particular its ability to induce or correspond with certain mental states in the viewer. A photograph can convey a feeling a joy (for example) in a similar way that a piece of music can. It was an idea to which Stieglitz had given the name of the 'Equivalent', in particular for a series of cloud studies he made in the 1920s. It was an idea that White was to develop both through his photography and his writings. A useful essay by White, 'Equivalence: The Perennial Trend' in the PSA Journal, (Vol. 29, No. 7, pp. 17-21, 1963) puts it thus: 'If the individual viewer realizes that for him what he sees in a picture corresponds to something within himself-that is, the photograph mirrors something in himself-then his experience is some degree of Equivalence.' The idea of mirroring is central to much of The idea of the 'Equivalent' goes beyond simple connotation or symbolism and it is not a simple matter of a relation to the subject matter. It is a function that operates at two different times and places - when the picture is made and when it is viewed. The making of the picture involves the photographer and the subject, and carries on in the craft processes involved in developing the negative and in the physical production of the print. But the viewer of the print also has an active role in the process if equivalence is to work. When Stieglitz photographed clouds, he was certainly not interested in meteorology. The form of the clouds - their shape and gradation - was certainly important, but not in the simple sense that one might see faces or shapes in them, such as a brooding eagle or vulture. Such shapes might have their place, along with their tonal values, in arousing certain specific mental states or feelings in the photographer which it would then be necessary to try and capture by suitable framing and transformation through film, development and printing to the print. The final stage in the process involves the viewer looking at the print and feeling the same way, experiencing the same emotions as the photographer. The photographer's aim is not simply 'self-expression', but to analyse what they are feeling and use the expressive controls of the medium to convey these feelings to the viewer. 'Self-expression' is of course usually an excuse for a lack of both analysis and control. To the twenty-first century secular reader, the use by White of the term 'spirit' (or rather when he wrote it, 'Spirit') may well be a stumbling block. White uses the term to mean something that is the centre of our human experience and of our aesthetic experience in particular. It is a centrality that transcends fashions, trends and particular circumstance, something that is at the ground of our being, both as individuals and as a part of a shared culture. We may prefer to paraphrase 'spirit' according to our own philosophical tastes. White later realised this problem and tended to avoid it, talking instead about 'creative' or 'sacred' photography. White's spiritual journey led him, through both Gurdjieff philosophy and photography, to attempt to be at one with that spirit, to reach the deepest levels of his and our nature. Although White had worked with a series of pictures in 1942 before joining the army, it was only with his 'Second Sequence/Amputations' of 1947 that he began to explore new methods of linking images in sequence. Other photographers - such as Walker Evans in his 'American Photographs' - had created highly structured picture sequences, but the model on which they worked could generally be called 'cinematic', deriving from the techniques developed by the early Russian film directors such as Eisenstein. If White had a conscious model for his own work it undoubtedly came from the Catholic Church, with its series of 'stations of the cross', each inviting and provoking contemplative meditation as the viewer followed his pilgrimage around the exhibition display. His sequence 'Song without Words' was his first post-war show, held at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1948. White went to a conference on photography held at Aspen, Colorado in 1951, taking one of his recent series with him to show the delegates. Many of those at the event expressed their dissatisfaction with the current photographic magazines. Later a small group met at Ansel Adams's house and they determined to start a magazine to publish and discuss fine photography. The model on which it was based was Alfred Stieglitz's 'Camerawork' from the early years of the century. The first issue of the new quarterly, 'Aperture' came out the following year with White as unpaid editor and production manager. Aperture was to be one of White's main ways of spreading his ideas about photography for over twenty years. It almost collapsed after the seventh issue, when almost all the founders felt it was getting nowhere and as always it had run out of money. One subscriber, Shirley Burden, felt it should be continued and he came to see White and put up the money - perhaps a thousand dollars - to keep it going. Again, White felt that he had done enough in 1964, but was persuaded to keep it going by Michael Hoffman. Aperture has always existed on a shoestring, with almost all its publications being subsidised by the generosity of people who have recognised its great contribution to photography. Some issues were catalogues for shows he produced at MIT, including 'Octave of Prayer' (1972). This exhibition discredited him with much of the photographic audience in general. Aiming, as Jonathan Green wrote on the cover to focus 'the teachings of theologians and mystics on the practice of contemporary American photography' it struck many as combining dross and nonsense with perceptive comment in the text and having a similar mix of the good photography with banal (usually religious) imagery. There was some fine photography in the book - for example two pictures by Milton Rogovin and one by Edward Weston, as well as work by Eugene Richards, Kelly Wise and others, but there was also much which was trite and clichéd. It seemed to reflect a lack of critical judgement on White's part. The fourth and last of the catalogue issues, 'Celebrations', was much more successful in the choice of photographs and avoided the lengthy text of 'Octave of Prayer'. Centered around the idea of photographs that celebrate human existence, it was impressive in the variety and standard of the work selected by White and Jonathan Green. There are pictures by well-known names which seldom disappoint, and also some fine work by people I've never heard of, and the book is also a fine example of visual sequencing. Aperture continues in business both as a magazine and also as a publisher of fine photographic books and limited edition prints. If you have never seen this great magazine it is worth seeking out in a good photographic bookshop or library and taking a look at it. If you have a serious interest in photography and can afford its relatively modest charges, it deserves support either as a subscriber or supporter. At the two-year subscription rate the magazine is excellent value for what is essentially 8 high quality books. White lost his teaching job in California in 1953, largely because he could not be bothered to fight when the director of the school cancelled his course. By this time, Beaumont Newhall was curator at George Eastman House (GEH) in Rochester, having resigned from MOMA when Edward Steichen was appointed without his knowledge as Director of Photography. White phoned Newhall and asked if he needed any help in Rochester. Newhall told him to come as soon as possible. White more or less packed his case and left on the spot to join GEH as an assistant curator. He stayed with the Newhalls for some months before moving into a small apartment of his own, and it was two years before he was sufficiently settled to bring all of his effects from California. The work at GEH did not suit White, despite his close personal relations with the Newhalls, but he stuck at it for several years. It was in Rochester that he developed his interests in mysticism and Eastern philosophy. Nancy Newhall gave him a book on the subject, and others introduced him to such works as Herigel's 'Zen and the Art of Archery' which was to figure in his teaching. Various other friends were also studying similar ideas at the time, and it was photographer Walter Chappell, who he had known in Portland, introduced him to the ideas of the I Ching, Zen and Gurdieff. He made contact with the local Gurdieff group whose activities were to provide a spiritual focus for the rest of his life, and much of the background for his 'Octave of Prayer'. In 1956, after several dispiriting years, he finally left his job at GEH. For the next nine years he supported himself by part time teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and by workshops around the USA. His home at 72 North Union St became an important cultural centre for photography, where students could live and work. Gurdieff's own institute in France, where students could come to live and work, probably influenced the lines on which it ran. White never advertised its existence and apparently only once actually asked students for money. Those who came were expected to contribute as they could, materially and spiritually, in keeping the place running with their labour and in paying the bills. As well as those who lived there, it was also a centre to which many other photographers came to visit and learn. The same kind of atmosphere was continued when White moved to Arlington, Massachusetts, on taking up an appointment as Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965. White lived there until his death in 1976. Descriptions abound of White's unconventional teaching methods, which alienated many of the students. There were some who felt they had come to learn photography and were upset to find they were expected to spend long times in relaxation exercises and meditation. Some assignments would involve activities such as simply standing on a street corner, watching. For most his methods were hard to take at first, but he was an imposing figure, very tall with striking and appropriately white hair that made, a prophet or guru. Those who stayed long enough usually came to admire him, and to take his ideas seriously. For those who survived the initial shock of his methods, one of the major parts of his method were the field trips where he and the students would go out to photograph together. There was much to be learnt watching the way he worked with his 4x5" Sinar view camera in the field and it was also greatly instructive to see later how the prints they produced compared to his taken in the same place. Workshops would involve pre-dawn body practice in the fields, vegetarian food, and camera projects such as 'What is your original face?' He aimed to make students aware of what they really felt about the pictures and their lives, asking them to question themselves and probing their responses. It was a teaching method that was at odds with the normal methods of schools and also with the inhibitions of his mainly male students who were used to hiding their feelings even from themselves. Even many of those who came to benefit greatly from them often had a great deal of initial inhibition to overcome. For many it was a dramatic turning point in their lives; one militant atheist went on to found a Zen monastery. |
There are I think two
great bodies of work in Whites photographic output, his landscapes, and
his close observations of pattern and form in often abstract works,
usually in close-up. Some of the best-known examples of this latter type of work are in the sequence 'Sound of One Hand Clapping.' This starts with a close-up of an oval shape set against a darker background. The caption describes it as a 'metal ornament', but it could equally well be a cell of some type caught in the microscope. The marks and gradations of tone in the object are ambiguous, but forming several circles or arcs inside the oval, giving no consistent clues as to its shape, and it remains mysterious. It draws our eye in but doesn't allow it to reach a conclusion. Perhaps it is a shallow bowl on which various materials have been allowed to evaporate? In the slide on the web it is shown upside down compared to its publication in the book 'Rites and Passages' but it makes little difference. The second picture is of a 'Burned Mirror' in Rochester in 1959, and appears to be a painted wooden surface from which some of the paint has peeled. There are three roughly vertical areas, from left to right dark grey, light wood and a slightly lighter dark grey paint. Roughly centrally across the latter two areas is a split oval shape, its longer axis vertical, perhaps suggesting a cartoon drawing of an eye. Obviously there is a visual link with the oval shape of the previous picture, and this is carried forward into the next image, the well-known 'Windowsill Daydreaming' (1958), also taken in Rochester. Here the oval is a pattern of light reflections on the window frame and wall below the part open sash, notable for its curious network of dark and light lines. It reminds me of the odd patterns we can sometimes see from within our own eyes. Above and to the right of this pattern of light are the curtains, their rectangular shapes contrasting and the overlapping layers and folds creating their own broader tonal patterns. There is for me a feeling of something more substantial than a pattern entering the room through the window. The next picture in the sequence - 'Galaxy' (1959) appears to be of shapes in frost on a window has as its centre a black oval and the theme develops through the rest of the work. Although the analysis of the windowsill picture as sexually related imagery by Yujiro Otsuki may stretch our imagination slightly, it is difficult not to see such meanings in the remaining pictures of the sequence. As suggested in the previous part of this feature, White was strongly influenced in his early landscape photography by the photography of Edward Weston, but in the 1950s he developed a much more individual approach. White's work moves away from the reality of the landscape into a dream world of unreal tonal values, whether by filtration or the use of infrared film. It is a world (as in dreams) where unusual connections are made, where the shadow of a telegraph pole leads across a glowing field towards a small light shed standing next to a larger dark shed with a white rectangle, all beneath a dark sky with unusual streaks and clouds ('Two Barns and a Shadow in the Vicinity of Naples and Dansville NY, 1955'). Or where a brilliant white lines of poplars in bright grass line a black road leading into the distance, or a dark barn points up like a the end of a signpost into a black sky with light clouds. The whole body of work from this area has a powerfully surreal quality. Most of White's closer students were young men; he was drawn to men and happier in their company, yet his methods could be said to be putting them in touch with a more feminine side of their nature, more concerned with feelings. Although a number of women did attend his classes and workshops, surprisingly few women feature in the accounts of his students and classes. Even fewer feature are in his published photographs. Time and the changes in cultural outlook referred to earlier have taken a cruel toll of some of his work. What fifty years ago would have seemed fond and intense portraits of young men and serious works on the male nude, now too often can only be seen as homosexual kitsch. In the 1950s and 60s, even the word homosexual was seldom met with outside technical literature of psychology and related fields. Of course most people were aware of the existence of such things - if only from a study of the classics or, at least in England, as a fairly routine stage of an upper class education in the so-called 'public schools', but there was a clear line between 'normal' intense relationships between men and acts which were then still illegal in most countries. 'Coming out' was still confined to debutantes. I don't intend to make moral judgements here - where I think aesthetic ones are more appropriate. Whatever our own orientation or moral position may be, we live in very different times and see the work of a innocent age through more knowing eyes. It is hard for me to take seriously the provocative pose of 'Bill La Rue at Carmel Highlands, California' in Sequence 17 from 1959 as he leans against a wall, its straight vertical plank and near horizontal line serving to emphasize the curve of his body and the tilt of his head as he gazes into camera, his own hands caressing his neck. We certainly don't need the glowing twigs rising from the bottom of the frame, one gleaming in front of his jeans and dark jumper or the curiously glowing wall between his clothed torso and the vertical beam to draw our attention to the open sexuality of his pose. White was intending to raise and explore the questions and agonizing that he felt about his sexuality and in particular his strong feelings towards men through these pictures. Although they may have succeeded at the time he made them, we perhaps need to think ourselves back to the different historical perspective in which they were made to appreciate them. There are pictures by White of men that we can still see and admire, in particular those where faces are not visible. These include several interesting male nude studies. These works, even when clearly arranged and designed, avoid the camp gaze and body-language of his posed young men. Unfortunately none of his pictures of men seem to be available online. White could write simply and precisely - as he did in his Zone System
books - about photography, and many of the short phrases which he used
with his prints have passed into the common stock of photographic wisdom,
even if we may differ on the meaning of some. Among those most often
quoted are:
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