DAY 223

FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS

Minor Martin White (1908–1976)

THINKING IN THE ABSTRACT

Minor White used photography to create metaphor, with individual objects serving as elements in a greater whole by providing line and form to the composition. His goal was to use the medium of photography to inspire certain feelings within the viewer. A master of the abstract, White’s photographs explore patterns in the natural elements of wood, moss, stone, leaves, and rope, or frost on a windowpane, each used as a tool to suggest a story or idea, often with a spiritual flavor. His work was often rendered with infrared film, which gave it an otherworldly, glowing quality.

White counted Ansel Adams among his group of close friends, and together the two developed the Zone system, which allowed them to create photographs with crystal-clear clarity of detail while others were creating soft, painterly images. In 1952, he cofounded Aperture magazine (along with Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Barbara Morgan), which he edited until 1975.

Over the years, White was a professor at many respected institutions, including the San Francisco Art Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his class on the Zone System, available only to senior-level students, was often overbooked. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, the International Museum of Photography, and the New York Public Library. —GC