PHOTOGRAPHS
White, Minor
U.S. (1908 - 1976)
Root and Frost, Rochester, New York
1958, printed c. 1974
Gelatin silver print on Agfa paper
8 3/4 x 12 15/16 in. (22.2 x 32.9 cm) image size;10 15/16 x 13 15/16 in. (27.8 x 35.4 cm) sheet size
Monsen Study Collection of Photography, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen
FA 84.19

Hired as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, White’s photographs were anything but documentary in their approach. He pursued interesting perspectives and strong contrasts that captured his singular vision. In his early photographs, as well as in the later Root and Frost, Rochester, New York, White achieved exciting compositions that highlighted each object’s distinctive features through his creative use of contrasting darks and lights.

In one of his unpublished manuscripts, White wrote about his practice, “I have heard Edward Weston say that he strove to eliminate all accidents from his work and I copied his striving. I submitted to that discipline by which one earns the elimination of all accidents. I have made enough pictures so that now I see like a lens focused on a piece of film, act like a negative projected on a piece of sensitized paper, talk like a picture on a wall. I have even been so presumptuous as to try to tell others how to see, act, and talk likewise. I know fairly well how to eliminate accidents from my photographing, and, paradoxically, in so doing I have also learned that the happy accident can be cultivated!” (Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays & Images: Illustrated Readings in the History of Photography, New York, 1980). -- Label copy for 150 Works of Art, October 1, 2005 to February 26, 2006.