In his lifetime, Minor White contributed largely to creating a distinctly modern American photographic style characterized by clarity, precision, and luminosity. His influence as a teacher at the Rochester Institute of Technology and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and as writer and editor of Aperture, one of the finest journals devoted to fine art photography since Alfred Stieglitz's elegant publication, Camera Work, alone established his reputation as an innovator in the field. His special contribution was his expansion of Stieglitz's concepts of sequence and equivalence by using photography as a means of exploring the spiritual and exploring higher forms of consciousness.
There was little in White's early life to suggest that he would eventually become one of the major forces in modern American photography. Born and reared in Minneapolis, White attended public schools and after graduation from high school entered the University of Minnesota where he majored in botany. During his university years he did learn the basics of photography but only to make photomicrograph, transparencies of algae for his scientific studies. Without realizing it at the time, what he saw though the microscope greatly influenced his senility to - and acceptance - of modern art and undoubtedly his future vision of photography. After graduation and the completion of one semester of graduate work in botany, White soon realized that this real love lay in the arts. After army service in World War II, White moved in 1945 to New York City. Because of his continuing passion for photography, he sought out Stieglitz, Beaumont Newhall (the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art), and Nancy Newhall, all of whom were instrumental in deepening his knowledge of the medium.
Spiritual Concerns
White's innate spirituality was a lifelong concern which expressed itself in a variety of forms- Catholicism, psychoanalysis, Surrealism, and mysticism. His first involvement in organized religion occurred through the inspiration of his friend Isabel Kane, a devout Catholic, who corresponded with him throughout the years that he served in an intelligence unit in the army during the war. He was baptized by an army chaplain in 1943 because, at the time, Catholicism seemed the most "authentic" religion. By 1950 White had left the Catholic Church because he felt that the rituals blocked his personal relation with God. In spite of his abandonment of Catholicism, it is interesting that he continued to be interested in the cross as a subject. The first of his cross photographs, Cemetery, Enterprise, Oregon (1941), shows a traditional view of Christ on the cross viewed against an ill kept graveyard and bleak rural landscape. Thirty-two years later in Ben's Beach, Peru (1973) he shot a similar image, but this them photographing a single cross on a simple grave that he discovered in a desert.
White was introduced to psychoanalysis by the noted art historian Meyer Schapire in one of his courses at Columbia University in 1945. Schapiro's lectures on art and the unconscious mind, for White, were related to Stieglitz's idea of equivalence, wherein the image mirrors something within ourselves rather than the subject matter itself. The photograph becomes a symbol or metaphor for something other than what is actually photographed.
Using the large-format camera and working in the straight tradition of Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Edward
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