January 1974. Minor White is sixty-five, and he is visiting Italy for the first time in his life. He has brought a group of MIT students with him, and in Rome he runs a workshop through the streets of the city. He photographs everything: the ruins and the churches, the Campidoglio and the EUR, Piazza del Popolo, the graffiti on the walls, the people. In the places tourists go, he practises his Zen. Of one image only does he make a large print, a wall print: the eroded colonnade of the Forum in the foreground, the pines, and above them the whiteness of the Vittoriano dominating everything. He never publishes it, never writes a line about it in his diaries. It is at Princeton, and today you can see it online.
Two years later, “Time” gives him an obituary that says everything, or nearly: “Died. Minor White, 67, photographer whose dramatic landscapes, writings and teaching — at numerous workshops and at MIT — made him one of the most influential artists of his generation; of a heart attack, in Boston. He had meant to be a poet, and he never stopped writing blank verse to set beside his photographs. His aim, he explained, was to get ‘from the tangible to the intangible’: his closeups of rocks, driftwood and swirling water were for him “inner landscapes,” metaphors for his states of mind. And the photographs he gathered into groups, the ‘sequences,’ were meant to be apprehended as one work, like a succession of movie stills”.
He is born in 1908. Not yet sixteen, he runs away from home after his parents discover in his diary notes on what he himself calls “homo-apprenticeship.” He returns a few months later, and at home the subject is never raised again. He will write about it much later: understanding that he would have to live a lie for the rest of his days is an enormous burden. He turns to the poetry of Walt Whitman for help. In “Calamus,” the section of Leaves of Grass in which the poet sings the love between men, he glimpses a way out of the question that burns in him: how can an outlaw lead a decent life, honest, useful, even ordinary? Then he discovers that, in a letter to John Addington Symonds, Whitman had denied what his city of friends said plainly. It is the second disappointment, and from it comes the promise he makes to himself: to live exactly the life his grandmother would have called “good,” simply to prove that a homosexual could do it. Decades later he will note that if he were asked whether one of his sequences was about homosexuality, he would circle the question at length before denying it, so as not to be misunderstood. Like Whitman. The most explicit sequence, The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors (1948), will be exhibited for the first time in 2014.
Nancy Newhall, critic and curator, friend and ally, once calls him “the Van Gogh of photography,” alluding to the pain and the solitude that mark his life. But the analogy says something else too: as with the Dutch painter, it is the need for salvation that gives the images their substance, and that dictates what White teaches. Many young photographers seek him out to learn a craft and end up somewhere else: his energy works like a magnet and pushes them onto a road that is no longer technical but spiritual. One of the mantras repeated in the workshops is: “Photograph things not for what they are, but for what else they are.”
The pilgrimage begins with his conversion to Catholicism in 1942, ripened during his years of military service in the southern Philippines in the Second World War. His belonging to the Church of Rome will fade; the search will not. He arrives at Christian mysticism read through Evelyn Underhill, then at Zen, then at work with the Gurdjieff groups — the Armenian-Greek master who taught exercises for waking from the sleep of ordinary consciousness.
Fifty years after his death, White is “one of the most important American photographers you’ve never heard of,” as Katherine A. Bussard explains with a smile; she is curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum and keeper of the artist’s archive. The anniversary brings with it two very different exhibitions. Fundación MAPFRE is giving him the first European retrospective on this scale, curated by Carlos Gollonet: Barcelona until 6 September, then Madrid from 24 September to 10 January 2027. At Princeton, meanwhile, Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan has opened, curated by Brendan Fay, who sets him beside the two colleagues with whom he shaped an American way of thinking about and teaching photography.
His points of reference are clear from the 1930s onward: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams. But the author who influences him most is not a photographer; he is an actor and director. He is Richard Boleslavsky, the figure at the origin of what would become the Actors Studio, whose Acting: The First Six Lessons gives White the cue for working out his own method. For the director, authenticity on stage can be born from the recall of personal memories, and the actor is an emotion maker, a manufacturer of emotions built with measure and with craft. That lesson stays with him in the first essay White publishes, “When Is Photography Creative?”, in 1943. In it he divides photographers into two families: the expressive, turned in on themselves, who do not work for the viewer; and the creative, who aim instead to arouse emotion in others. Photography is not confession but construction. And Boleslavsky’s last chapter, the one on rhythm, gives him his instrument: ordered, measurable variations that keep the viewer’s attention awake and lead it, without a jolt, where the author has decided to take it.
The idea of photography as a workshop of emotions is already in Stieglitz, who called his cloud images “equivalents”: a photograph can be more than what it reproduces, it can stand as the visual equivalent of an emotional state. White meets the master, founder of the gallery 291 and of the magazine Camera Work, in 1946 in New York. They talk, they look at photographs together. The artist notes down a single exchange, in which Stieglitz asks him: “Have you been in love?” Minor answers yes. And Stieglitz, adding nothing: “Then you can photograph.” From that approach White will accept its most uncomfortable consequence in full, the one his adversaries throw back at him: that his photographs are deluxe Rorschach tests. He does not deny it; he turns the charge around. Suggestibility is not a flaw in the medium, it is the way in to art.
Out of this private workshop comes, in 1952, the public undertaking. The magazine “Aperture” is born in San Francisco, founded and at first financed by the photographers themselves: alongside White are Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, among others. Within a few years it becomes a point of reference for what they called serious photography (read: neither commercial nor photojournalistic). But it is only one piece of something larger. What binds White to his friends Siskind and Callahan, Fay puts like this: “not about the style of the photographs but the infrastructure they had to build,” so that in the 1950s somebody would look at a photograph as a work of art. All three find themselves running university programmes at a moment when it is not yet clear whether teaching photography means training professionals or giving a humanist education through an artistic medium. All three choose the second road. Not job training for a trade, says Fay, but the time to work out why that medium mattered: a hard thing to sell to tuition-paying students, then as now. And it works: by the 1970s university courses have become the launching pad for American photographic careers. With a paradoxical outcome, which Fay does not soften: that system became useful to people who made work that looked nothing like Minor White’s work.
In 1972 “Aperture” publishes “Octave of Prayer”, the issue-cum-catalogue of an exhibition at MIT, where White has taught since 1965. The title alludes to a scale of eight degrees of prayer, of the kind Christian mysticism has been codifying for centuries: one starts from the recited formula and arrives at mystical union, that is, at silence. To climb is to lose the supports, one after another: first the words, then the concepts, finally the images. White maintains that photography works only on the lowest rungs, and that of the two thousand photographs that arrived from an open call, the only ones that deserve to stay are those “on prayer” and those “for meditation.” He states the criterion of selection without embarrassment: “radiant to the heart,” so that judgement moves from the head to the breast. Of his own work he puts a single image in the volume, and almost all of the text.
The demolition comes in March 1973 from the Village Voice, signed by A. D. Coleman, later a critic for the New York Times. The publication, he writes, proves that White has given up being a photographer and a teacher in order to make himself the priest of a religion all his own, the Cult of Camera: a visual banality so adolescently puerile as to be offensive, held together by an intellectual Jesuitry that Coleman calls arrogant, anti-creative and “proto-totalitarian.” And he dispatches him with a comparison that in 1973 must have sounded ferocious: it reminds him of those arcane Southern California sects for which orange juice is the one true sacrament. The “Voice” refuses to publish the second instalment of the polemic; Coleman resigns, and the piece appears in full in “Camera 35” in November, with White’s reply in the same issue. It is not that article alone that puts out the star. But from then on White’s name begins to circulate less than those of his contemporaries, and it has never made up the ground since.
Something seems to have changed. White’s spiritual dimension is something “maybe we are more interested and open to today,” Bussard explains. But the reasons for the eclipse are not all critical. One has to do with the work: White “was so interested and expansive in his thinking that at some point he stopped being identifiable with one kind of photograph.” Making photographs, publishing them, theorising them: all of it mattered to him equally, and whoever will not be pinned down is harder to remember.
The other reason Bussard has come to understand by comparing the archives the museum holds. “Minor White suffered in his legacy for not having heirs. The system is set up to support heteronormative photographers who have spouses and heirs who can argue for the value of the photographs, the value of the estate, the value of the archive.” But it was not only descendants he lacked. What was also missing was a single powerful gallery to carry his name for decades, as Pace Gallery did for Harry Callahan. It is that commercial backbone that decides how visible a photographer remains.
The return of interest, if there is one, comes by three roads. The first is that the trial of 1973 was never quite what it seemed: Coleman, republishing the demolition in 2018, did not retract a line, but was careful to specify that as a thinker, teacher, writer, editor and photographer White made serious contributions to the medium that he valued then and continues to value today. The condemnation was of the priest, never of the photographer. Then there is the complete publication of Memorable Fancies, on which Todd Cronan worked for five years: before that, Bussard reckons, no more than two dozen people had read that journal in its entirety. And there are the young. At the Princeton symposium, artists such as David Benjamin Sherry and Dionne Lee spoke of White as one of those “on whose shoulders they stood.” Many of them teach in universities, and White ends up on their syllabi.
The grand finale of the exhibition at Fundación MAPFRE, which restages White’s major sequences on a large scale, is Slow Dance, the only colour sequence he made public in his lifetime. Dual-projection slides born of his interest in movement and in the Gurdjieff dances — at the time something closer to a performance than to an exhibition. It had remained in the archive until it was reconstructed by Brendan Fay. The images, here in digital form to preserve the extremely fragile originals, dissolve one into another. Sugared-almond pinks, chocolate browns, blues of the bluest: colours at once real and impossible. The reflections on wet surfaces have an almost tactile quality. Bussard counts it among the joys of these years: it “feels like it has nothing to do with other kinds of images we might associate with Minor White.”
At his death he leaves the house in Arlington to “Aperture”, his personal effects to the Boston group of Gurdjieff followers, the entire archive to Princeton. Three lives divided among three beneficiaries, by a man who never wanted to be one thing only.
To Italy, while he was alive, he came only once. Dead, he has come back twice: with the monograph “Riti e passaggi”, published by Giovanni Chiaramonte for Jaca Book in 1992, and with the exhibition Filippo Maggia devoted to him in 2001 in Modena and Milan, “Life is Like a Cinema of Stills”. Today the retrospective is in Spain. Bussard says they are working on a third European venue, and the Princeton show will tour the United States until 2028. “Not yet,” she answers when asked about Italy. “We’d love to land it in Italy.” Meanwhile the large print of the photograph of the Forum stays where it is, at Princeton. Nobody has ever seen it hanging in an exhibition.
