All posts by kukkurovaca

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Pier 24 / Erik Kessels

Pier 24: (Sloppy) Second(s)hand

Purely coincidentally, I also recently went to see Secondhand at Pier 24. My thoughts about it are fewer and less interesting than @vossbrink’s, so I’ll try to express them with some brevity.

Pier 24

Pier 24 is weird. I’m not big on museums and galleries generally, and this was perhaps my least favorite experience in one, because it is one of the least accessible contexts I’ve encountered for viewing art.

To start with, it is only open during weekday working hours, and by appointment. It’s free, which is nice, but it is essentially never accessible to someone with a regular work week. That speaks volumes to who it (isn’t) for, and is one of the major reasons why I hadn’t visited previously.

The “no text on the walls” gimmick is ::shrug:: for me. I’m sure there’s an argument to be made for letting work speak for itself, but I’m not the one to make it. (And if you make it to me, it’ll probably sound like the voices of the adults in Charlie Brown.) Public-facing displays of art should include as much useful context as is feasible. This is my stance regardless of whether the work in question is something I happen to know a decent bit about or not.1

That said, the information in the book is adequate. I don’t think I gained anything from reading it in a book rather than looking at it on the wall. Mainly it just induced unnecessary cognitive dissonance to navigate a relatively non-linear space while flipping through an extremely linear book.

Kessels

Erik Kessels seemed to be What It Was About, with other artists rounding things out a bit, and in some cases (the Richard Prince cowboy) seeming actually a bit out of place and gratuitous.

The Kessels stuff seemed to be largely about playing with scale. Expanding and exploding. Or reducing and inundating. The result is very clever.2 I was repeatedly put in mind of those Stephen Biesty cross-section books, not because Kessel’s explosions are illustrative, but because they look like something that has been chopped up into pieces.

That being said, I did think the big Photo Cubes were pretty funny.

Pier 24: Secondhand

The Big Fucking Roomful of 4×6 Prints3 was also entertaining, mostly just because it was fun to watch people get down into the piles and investigate them under the supervision of a bored-looking docent. I also found myself for the first time actually appreciating watermarks on photos, because they provided a layer of information about the image’s source that was otherwise missing.4

Pier 24: Secondhand

I wasn’t taken with Kessels’s provided explanation of the room’s purpose:

I visualize the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples’ experiences.

Not to rehash The 1978 Test, but what is the mindset of the artist for whom an image glut is a problem or source of fear and anxiety? Why does or should an abundance of imagery induce a feeling of drowning?

A whole world full of other people and their experiences was always there before. And unless artists are all thoroughgoing solipsists, they must know that. So why is the representation of those experiences perceived as overwhelming? Why does the artist (and why is the viewer expected to) “drown” in it? Why can I not escape the feeling that the so-called vernacular image can only manifest to artists and curators as a problem to be solved or an opportunity to exploited? Is the place of an artist in the world dependent on the anonymity and invisibility of everyone else in it?

I sometimes think that at heart, the “serious” photographer has never really evolved past the original form of the camera operator: a person whose vocation is defined primarily by access to a novel technology which for their audience is still unavailable or mysterious. The photographer as gadgeteer has generally been scorned by those who pursued the medium as an art, but maybe that was always just a case of Protesting Too Much. And maybe, deep down, this secret shame has been driving art photography all along.

Or maybe not. But it’s one way to account for the persistent down-the-decades anxiety of the photographic artist confronted with a world of vernacular images.

Archive of Modern Conflict

Pier 24: Secondhand

Some of my favorite photographs were from the Archive of Modern Conflict—but as a series, it was not so great. Although I cannot find the tweet at the moment, I think @vossbrink put it as the whole being less than the sum of its parts. This, and a few of the other rooms as well, put me in mind of Szarkowski’s statement that

It is important to remember that an anonymous photographer is simply a photographer whose name we have lost, perhaps temporarily. When we recover it, and find out the name of his town and his wife (or her husband), we can begin writing dissertations about him or her, but the work has not changed.

This is, I suppose, a rather old-fashioned way to look at vernacular photographs. But more often than not, what I feel when I am looking at some photograph that has been appropriated into a sequence or other larger work is that really, I would rather know more about the person who made the photograph and less about the what the appropriating artist has decided it should now come to mean.

Hank Willis Thomas

Pier 24: Secondhand

One part of the whole experience that I really, really liked were Hank Willis Thomas’s flag presentation case…I’m not sure how to describe them except as photo tangrams, really. I don’t have anything illuminating to say about them, but they’re great.

And no, I didn’t just like them because I have a thing for flags. Although man, did I kick myself for not bringing my IR camera that day.

Appropriating Down

Something that @vossbrink and I have been talking about lately has been the difference between “appropriating up” and “appropriating down,” in the sense of “punching up” versus “punching down” in comedy.

This useful distinction has seen a lot of action over the last few years in discussions of comedy, and specifically who is or should be fair game as the butt of a joke. Basically, “punching up” means comedy that cuts at someone with more power than you, and “punching down” means comedy that cuts at someone with less power than you. Most non-assholes would agree that it makes more sense to look at edgy comedy this way than according to the rubric that everybody is fair game or that a comedian can be an “equal opportunity offender,” because of course the world is not a fair or equal one. Punching down is the comedic equivalent of bullying.5

Recently, and particularly in the context of discussion of Prince’s Instagram stuff, where—ethics & legality of re-use/copyright stuff notwithstanding—we’ve been thinking about appropriation in those “punch up”/”punch down” terms.

There’s a pretty big difference between the kind and quality of commentary and criticism we find in Prince’s use of Marlboro ad images and what we find in his use of images from Instagram. And thus a difference in the worth of those bodies of work.

I mentioned above that Prince’s cowboy is out of place in Secondhand; it’s because the majority of the show consists of work that appropriates down. I think there is no question that it is exploitive of photography produced by regular human beings—the most charitable question I can think to pose is whether it is merely exploitive in the sense of the exploitation of a natural resource. Conversely, many of the best works in Secondhand are the exceptions to this rule, the images that appropriate up by drawing on iconic historical images or imagery produced by governments or institutions.


  1. Granted, outside of the particular areas of photography that I’m very into, usually that’s “or not.” 
  2. As you may already know, I generally use “clever” in a derogatory sense; this is not an exception. 
  3. Not the actual title. 
  4. “A work of art so bad it made me reconsider my feelings about watermarks on digital photos” is a very mean sentence that I decided to put in a footnote instead of the body of the post. 
  5. Note: The meaning of the word “bullying” has been muddled somewhat recently, especially as regards online debates, especially by being used as a slur against legitimate criticism from women of color. I mean actual bullying as such, in which someone uses their size/power/money/etc. to go after someone with less size/power/money/etc. 

Gendering Portraits

On the 4th, I saw this awesome photo in my Twitter timeline:

Harnaam Kaur by Brock Elbank

The tweet linked to a Daily Mail 1 article on Harnaam Kaur, the only female subject in a series of epic beard photos by a photographer named Brock Elbank.

After being bullied as a teen, the teaching assistant tried waxing, shaving and bleaching to hide her facial hair.
Once baptized Sikh, a religion which forbids cutting body hair, the 23-year-old decided to embrace her body as it was.
‘When I first started growing my beard it was for religious reasons but as the years have gone by I’ve kept it for more personal reasons.
‘It makes me feel like a brave, confident woman who isn’t afraid to break society’s norms,’ she added.

So great, right?

From a photography standpoint, it’s interesting to compare Kaur’s portrait to those of the men which the Daily Mail included for comparison:

I have very little in the way of formal photography education, and what little of that there is, was mostly dedicated to retro technicalities like darkroom work. But one of the things that I found fascinating (and not a little disquieting) was the centrality of gender in standard portrait lighting and posing.

The photography program in question is of the trade school flavor, and so the focus habitually was on workaday commercial representations—actor headshots, for example, or photos of business folks businessing. In those applications, representing the gender of the subject in a way that makes them appealing and hireable is one of the main considerations.

That gender is something actively constructed and performed is something I’ve understood for a long time, but until I was actually being taught portrait 101 stuff, it never occurred to me that a photographer has to play an active role in gendering a portrait subject. In my habitual way of thinking, another person’s gender identity and expression is primarily their business, and aside from not misgendering them, not something I need to do anything about.2

So this idea that before I could start working through a portrait of somebody, I’d have to make decisions about what sort of masculinity or femininity I would be building for them was super, super weird. I could (and did) question a lot of what the instructor had to offer in terms of received wisdom for what women and men should look like in portraits—but there’s no easy alternate wisdom to swap in. One can make different choices about this, but one cannot not make choices about it.


  1. Not normally a source of awesome things. 
  2. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the best default stance; it’s just how I’ve processed this stuff for as long as I can remember. 

Fertile Ground at OMCA

About a week ago, I went to see Fertile Ground at the Oakland Museum. It’s an interesting show, although one largely outside my wheelhouse.

There’s some neat f/64 material, and a small but spot-on section about CSFA and the boom in post-war, GI Bill-fueled college enrollment. This includes material on Ansel Adams and Minor White at CSFA, an important inroad of photography into academic art instruction. My favorite part was this magazine article by White:

Photography in an art school

I can’t help reading it in the style of the Berkeley Farms “Farms….in Berkeley? (mooooooo)” slogan.

While I’m not particularly fluent in media other than photography, there was some stuff there I loved1. My favorite thing, though, is that around the corner from this gigantic map of the relationships in the “Mission Scene”:

Mission Scene Map

Map of Relationships in the Mission Scene room

…tucked away in a fire exit, nearly out of sight, was a handful of printed ephemera decrying yuppie incursion into the Mission.

Mission Yuppie Eradication Project

Mission Yuppie Eradication Project

This utterly charming but carefully peripheral display was more or less the only nod to the existence of gentrification in a room about artists working in a neighborhood which is practically synonymous with the problem of gentrification and class resentment. Note also that by using dated, anonymous ephemera, the curators are framing the issue as one that is implicitly quaint and not relevant to the intentions of any particular artist.

This is in contrast to the substantial engagement with social issues in the room devoted to work of the 30’s, which deals both with the important issues of the day, and the ways in which artists’ political views influenced their relationships, their work, and their visibility.

This attention to the sociopolitical diminishes in the CSFA room, and is almost absent in the UC Davis and Mission Scene2 rooms. The message seems to be that engagement with political realities is part of the past of California art—albeit a treasured part—and that while art continues to brave and challenging, the challenge it presents is no longer to the world, but just to itself.


  1. My favorite bits: Rivera, Edith Hamlin, Bernard Zakheim’s Tractored Out, Sargeant Johnson, Clyfford Still (“painting that instructed even as it destroyed” — Kenneth Sawyer), Margaret Kilgallen, Richard Shaw, Roy De Forest. 
  2. There’s definitely love for street art in the Mission Scene room, and I don’t want to say none of the art there is political, but the thing about a street aesthetic (or any aesthetic, really) is that it is easily decontextualized. The point isn’t whether the art is political, but that the show is assiduous about placing some works in a political context and others not. 
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Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit

A new Minor White thing? Time to send up the kukkurovaca signal!1

There’s no way I’m going to LA, but I did immediately order a copy of the book. Of course.

Background

The text provides a biographical overview of White’s life and work; the selected images are drawn from across White’s career, and include two full sequences, fragments from several other sequences, and standalone images.

The book is well-researched and detailed, but it is an overview, structured for breadth rather than depth. If the subject were almost any other photographer of White’s stature, it might seem superfluous, but in White’s case, it’s actually something we’ve badly needed for some time.

White was a great photographer and an historically important one, but he has become frustratingly obscure in popular photographic consciousness. It’s hard to find good information about him, and it’s hard to find good reproductions of his work. Googling him is barely productive at all—and for a long time, the only readily available in-print books on him were The Moment of Seeing: Minor White at the California School of Fine Arts and Aperture’s intermittently offered monograph Minor White: Rites and Passages.

Moment of Seeing isn’t…bad, as such, but it’s very narrowly focused, limiting itself just to White’s role at CSFA. Rites and Passages has a decent selection of photos, and contains a decent sample of White’s writing, but it’s confusingly organized and edited in too hagiographic a style. It seems to consistently take White at his word about himself, which is a bad idea, because White was not a reliable narrator.

I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy Peter Bunnell’s Minor White: The Eye That Shapes at one of my local brick and mortar bookstores. Bunnell’s book is fantastic, and I highly recommend it, but it’s also a dense, academic work that most folks would have to go well out of their way to get their hands on.

So, I’m very pleased that we’re seeing new, easily obtained, and reasonably accessible books about White coming out—first the Bunnell-edited Aperture Anthology: The Minor White Years, and now Martineau’s book. They should make it a lot easier for folks who are curious about White’s work to find a decent place to begin.

Manifestations of the Spirit also benefits from having greater distance from White. As I mentioned, Rites and Passages has a whiff of hagiography, and Bunnell’s work on White is marked by their closeness2—not that he isn’t appropriately objective, but his approach is definitely that of a student who values his teacher’s legacy. That care is part of what makes The Eye that Shapes and Aperture Anthology so valuable, but it’s also desirable to have other, less in-house perspectives on White.

“A love of God can grow out of a love for the flesh”

The most useful thing Manifestations of the Spirit does is not just contextualize White’s photographs in terms of his sexuality and/or his spirituality, but in terms of how the two informed each other, and how they were informed by his relationships with friends and lovers.

It’s very common to talk about White’s spirituality or his sexuality, or even to talk about them both, but generally as two influences on his photographs. The material that Martineau emphasizes points to the essential unity of spirituality and sexuality in White’s work.

It is also common to treat White’s spiritual trajectory as coming from within him, and to take his adoption of labels or ideas at face value. Thus his highly questionable status as the “zen” photographer. Actually, White’s new age spiritual journey was diverse, changeable, and meandering. And as Manifestations shows, that changeability in part reflects the input of different people at different times in White’s life.

So, it’s quite helpful to know when and by whom White was introduced to certain books or schools of thought. For example:

In 1953 White met a dancer named William Smith through a mutual friend, and they became lovers. It was the beginning of a relationship that would continue intermittently for more than three decades. Smith soon introduced White to Christian mysticism through the work of the English writer and pacifist Evelyn Underhill, and Smith became the subject of Sequence II: The Young Man as a Mystic (155). “This sequence is my heart laid bare and how!” White wrote in his journal. Some will realize that it is done for the love of God. Most will think it sentimental and for the love of flesh. But that I cannot help. Maybe it will be beautiful to a few borderline cases and who because of the sequence will realize for the first time that a love of God can grow out of a love for the flesh.”
(p. 11)

and:

…White had met Chappell on a YMCA-sponsored outing in 1941 while he was living in Portland; they became friends after a chance encounter years later in San Francisco. It was Chappell who introduced White to the I Ching and to the esoteric teachings of Russian-born mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. In Rochester, Chappell became one of White’s students and collaborators, co-writing “Some Methods for Experiencing Photographs,” which included Gurdjieffian concepts, for Aperture.
(p. 16)

It’s very helpful to be able to put dates and human faces to these philosophical influences on White. And it’s interesting that so much of White’s spiritual direction was determined through his social contacts—as opposed to White’s more active research in other areas.3 And indeed, if one knew of White’s ideas mainly from White’s own published writing, one could easily miss this. He always wrote in the most authoritative possible terms, and he owned his every enthusiasm without hesitation.

I’m not sure what it says about White that his deepest beliefs were so shaped by others—it may be that he was just easily influenced by the ideas of those around him, or that the ideas he was most drawn to were circulating mainly through word of mouth, and so would logically come to him that way. Or perhaps—and this seems more likely to me—it is that for White, as for most people, religion was something that had to be practiced in community to have meaning. White could not fully participate in institutional religion4 available at the time, but he could discover and create an ad hoc spirituality within the community of his friends.

This is also helpful in making sense of the often messy syncretism that White came away with: it is not just a matter of the integrity (or lack of integrity) of the ideas themselves, but of their place in the community White was building. This fits with my sense of how White approached photography also—that he spoke in absolute and universal terms while actually constructing a densely coded semiprivate language for use with his students and friends.

The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors

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One of the major points of pride for the book and the exhibition is the inclusion of the entire sequence of The Temptation of St. Anthony is Mirrors, of which White made only two copies: one for himself, and one for the model, Tom Murphy.

In a particularly intense period of creative activity between 1948 and 1950, White produced three sequences expressing his love and sexual feelings for men. Intent on using the camera as a tool for self-discovery, White believed that all of his pictures were mirrors of himself; hence the unusual title of the first sequence, The Temptation of St. Anthony is Mirrors. The sequence comprises thirty-two photographs of White’s student Tom Murphy. Photographs of Murphy’s hands and feet are interspersed with the larger group of portraits and nude figure studies, which draw on the history of art, both religious and secular, from the dead body of Christ to ancient Greek sculpture. White’s photograph of Murphy’s lithe, athletic body in Tom Murphy, San Francisco communicates the complex mixture of feelings that White brought to his work and the sense that he handled it with the utmost reverence and care. These qualities are abundant in Stieglitz’s extensive series of his love and wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, but through his expert use of natural light, White surpassed Stieglitz’s example.
(p. 8)

The comparison to Stieglitz’s photographs of O’Keeffe is interesting, and in some respects apropos, although possibly the comparison to Weston’s photographs of Charis Wilson, which I think Martineau made in his MAN Podcast interview, is more apt.

However, it seems clear from the title that with this subject White intended these photographs to function as reflections of himself as well as a “visual love poem”5 to Murphy. To treat the photograph as a mirror of self is in fact White’s normal modus operandi—but in this case, I think the mirroring concept also connects up to certain things White wrote about his homosexuality in relation to gender and to the concepts of self and other. For White, I think sexuality never stopped having an element of identity crisis.

“Pathetic, Ill, the Inwards Turning of One Who Became Confused Many Years Ago”

Martineau treads lightly regarding the ramifications of White’s closetedness and his sometimes wrenchingly acute self-loathing. But he does surface material that casts White in a harsher light. This, in particular, is difficult and important:

In 1962, the Los Angeles-based photographer Edmund Teske sent White two hundred photographs and asked him to make a selection for publication in Aperture. When White reviewed the prints, their message of same-sex love and lust struck close to home, and he sent Teske an astonishingly personal letter of advice:

These prints outline for me a rather tragic story of a man’s life. The story is familiar to many people in our society: childhood home, for some reason the sex wires get crossed, confusion, self pity, anger guilt all arise in various combinations. The remarkable psychological image of the nude with the tools is the most direct expression of the hidden desire to transform the male into the female that I have ever seen. Thereafter come the twisting cause by the psychological blocks, the anger, the disintegration, the denying principle in the human being becomes stronger and stronger. And there is no end to it, the inner conflict is neither resolved by solution or by death. Not a pleasant story. Nevertheless it is a story that if you wish and if you can see the story you can universalize and then offer to people as a mirror of themselves. Your photographs are still mirrors of yourself. In other words your images are raw, the emotions naked. To present these to others they need appropriate clothes. These are private images not public ones. They are “expressive” meaning a direct mirror of yourself rather than “creative” meaning so converted as to affect others as mirrors of themselves. I found tears coming to my eyes as I wen thru these photographs, the whole thing is pathetic, ill, the inwards turning of one who became confused many years ago, retreated from the world and eats his own heart out …
I have met you, seen you, and feel moved to suggest that you try to understand your work. It is very real. And further suggest out of a welling heart that you try to universalize your private images and make them for the love of other people.

The emotional tone of White’s letter is a clear indication of his ambivalent feelings as well as ability to be, alternately, tough and tender.
(p. 19)

Martineau’s summation of that letter seems…notably understated. It’s actually a pretty offensive level of projection that White seems to be doing there. It’s valuable to have the context, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen parts of that diatribe reproduced elsewhere (in Aperture, maybe?), as examples of good Minor White criticism. (And I guess it could be, but the background should certainly inform how it’s read.)

“These are private images not public ones”—This is a kind of distinction that in White’s writing I have usually read simply in terms of the the tension between abstraction and realism in his photographs. But here it is clearly also getting at something White has internalized regarding what feelings can be expressed openly and what must be coded—no, worse, what ought to be expressed openly and what ought to be coded.

“Picking out the ultimate meaning”

One of the frustrating aspects of Manifestations is that it generally does not go very deep into specifics about White’s photographs, even as it establishes the importance and the difficulty of doing so.

White described his sequences as being like “a cinema of stills” and called on the viewer to be an active participant in experiencing the varied moods and associations that come to the fore while moving from one photograph to the next. “To engage a sequence,” White wrote, “we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the one in our eye.” Over the course of his career, White created over one hundred sequences, series, and portfolios. Viewers of his sequences must not only read each individual image in relation to adjacent images but also consider all of the images in the highly structured grouping as the complete expression of an idea. As Peter C. Bunnell has aptly pointed out, White’s sequences have many levels of meaning, but these can generally be categorized into three main groups: superficial, underlying, and ultimate. The superficial meaning is descriptive; the underlying meaning is symbolic; and the ultimate meaning is intensely personal and thus the most elusive. Picking out the ultimate meaning requires both a good deal of concentration and a thorough understanding of what was going on in the artist’s life.
(p. 10)

On that last point, Martineau has done an unusually good job. He has created a timeline for White that brings together his personal life, his spiritual growth, his artistic work, and his academic career. Very useful, but it stops short of providing the reader with an interpretive apparatus that would enable understanding the “ultimate” meaning of the photographs.

In fact, it’s may well be impossible to participate in White’s communion of meaning from the present. White seemed to think that sufficiently intense looking could enable anyone to connect with deeply with his photographs—because he thought that he was dealing in universal truths or in feelings that had deep connections to intrinsic human experience.6 But that conceit is belied by the extreme nature of his pedagogy, which extended well into the territories of both religion (or cult) and psychology in conditioning students to make and read photographs.

White wasn’t just trafficking in artistic style, but in a calling and an hermetic discipline; knowing that to be so is important, but in itself does not actually enable one to get at those embedded meanings. Martineau and others do of course call out symbolism and themes in White’s work—but if that just gets to the “underlying” meaning, then is the “ultimate” always left as an exercise to the reader?

I suspect that is likely to be the case, although I would love to be proven wrong.7 But in the absence of writing that does try to bridge that gap, I think it might be helpful to start thinking (and writing) more explicitly about the illegibility of White’s photographs—not because they are bad photographs, or because today’s audience is too dumb or close-minded to access them, but because they are composed in a visual language which may no longer have speakers, and which is very incompletely documented.

“I saw rather than heard any sound”

While it does not get at the “ultimate” meaning, one of my favorite things in Manifestations is that Martineau provides some of the literal background on the construction of some of White’s more abstract photographs, including a few in the series Sound of One Hand,8 which is included in full.

White’s chef d’oeuvre, the work that is the summation of his persistent search for a way to communicate ecstasy, is Sound of One Hand, named after the Zen koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” White wrote, “After several months of intensive work on this koan, I saw rather than heard any sound.” When White saw The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Pultneyville, New York, he recognized the koan, and, as he explained, “the rest of the photographs appeared slowly over a two year period.”

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“The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Pultneyville, New York,” 1957

The central object in The Sound of One Hand Clapping resembles a Buddhist monk’s begging bowl. The circular marks inside, likely the result of being exposed to inclement weather, underscores the somewhat circular outer dimensions of what was, actually, a discarded water tank.

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“Windowsill Daydreaming, Rochester,” 1958

In Windowsill Daydreaming, Rochester, the hard, angular forms created by the window frame are in tension with the softness of the circular light that appears to be hovering magically at the base of the sill.

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“Empty Head, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester,” 1962

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“Galaxy, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester,” 1959

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“Burned Mirror, Rochester,” 1959

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“Dumb Face, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester,” 1959

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“Night Icicle, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester,” 1959

Night Icicle, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester was made in a window in White’s loft. The single-pane glass frosted up during the winter, creating the delicate filigree patterns that were softly illuminated by an electric light White had affixed to the roof of the building next door. Hanging from the eaves between the window and the light source, the icicle darkly penetrates the composition, sharply dividing it vertically.

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“Ritual Branch, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester,” 1958

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“Batavia, New York,” 1958

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“72 N. Union Street, Rochester,” 1959

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“Pavilion, New York,” 1957

As it was originally sequenced in 1960, Sound of One Hand contained ten photographs. The Getty version, with eleven photographs, is a variant, probably created for Michael Hoffman, which includes Pavilion, New York as the final image. In Pavilion, the circular form of the cement urn brings the viewer back to the circular form in the first picture, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, but instead of being empty, the presence of the two blooms this time suggests a gift given that is not present in the first photograph.
(p. 17)

The inclusion of the last “variant” image is interesting; to be honest, it does not seem to fit well with the other images. Regardless, it’s a series I like a lot, and which, whether or not it really demonstrates that White “saw rather than heard any sound,” makes a lot of…sense to me. It is the work of a man whose relationship to photography began with photomicrography and had as its turning point the adoption (with extreme prejudice) of Stieglitz’s concept of the equivalent.

Stieglitz’s canonical equivalents were clouds:

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—lovely in their own way, but the sky is always pre-invested by an expectation of portentousness. White’s best equivalents, even though they be derided as inscrutable, start with a close examination of what is near to hand, and frequently what is human in scale.

In their execution, they remind me of the scientific photographs—micrography, aerial surveys, etc.—that found their way into the early attempts at photographic abstraction, except that in White’s case, they are not valuable purely for their aesthetics but for their potential to transmit an understanding that could not be put into words.

White is often criticized for making images that seem to be a retreat from the world. That criticism is not wholly wrong; as I’ve said, White worked in a semi-private language, and with little regard for accessibility. But even if White sometimes fled from the real world, he always sought connection, communication, and communion with people, and that pursuit is never far from center in his photography or his writing.

Alternate History

A tantalizing branch point in the biographical material is that White accepted—and then rejected—a position with Edward Steichen at MoMA. As Martineau explains,

[Steichen’s] appointment ruffled feathers in the photographic community because it signaled a shift in the direction of the program, from the f/64 artists favored by the Newhalls toward more populist forms of photography such as fashion and photojournalism. Beaumont Newhall, who had been hoping to be promoted to the director’s position, resigned from his post as curator in protest. Steichen needed a curator and asked White if he would join the department. White said yes, but after longer consideration he changes his mind: a loyal friend of the Newhalls, he didn’t think he would enjoy working for Steichen. (p. 6)

This didn’t stunt White’s prospects within the academic photography community, by any means, but I can’t help wonder whether his trajectory—and that of photography itself—might not have been different, and perhaps better, if he had.

If Steichen and White had been collaborating together in the 40’s and 50’s, how might that mutual influence have shaped Steichen’s Family of Man? White dismissed the exhibition as “schmaltz“, which as I said in a previous post is telling, because in many ways Family of Man succeeded in doing things that White was trying to achieve, and for a huge and diverse audience.

I would love to have seen what photography looked like in a world where Steichen’s and White’s artistic values had tempered each other rather than simply taking up sides across a widening chasm between popular and academic photography. A more challenging Family of Man or a more accessible Octave of Prayer would be getting close to what I most want from photography as a medium.

Of course, I’m sure that if White had really taken the job, he would have lasted all of five minutes in it. But gosh, what an idea.


  1. (See previously: Minor White, Authenticity, and Reverie and Minor White’s Creed
  2. Bunnell was one of White’s students in residence. 
  3. In the opening of Manifestations, Martineau describes White’s systematic plundering of everything photography-related in the Portland library. In the MAN Podcast interview, he summed this up with something along the lines of, woe betide anyone else in Portland who wanted to read a photography book that year. 
  4. Although he did try Catholicism on, under the influence of another friend, Isabel Kane. 
  5. In the same podcast, Martineau described Temptation as a visual love poem, with the camera returning at intervals to parts of Murphy (such as hands and feet) in “a kind Of rhythmic pilgrimage.” 
  6. I wonder if his readings in Buddhism brought him into contact with the idea of the Pratyekabuddha
  7. And I am definitely not the one to provide such deep readings of White’s work. 
  8. bart_one_hand

    Lisa: It’s a 3000-year-old riddle with no answer. It’s supposed to clear your mind of conscious thought.
    Bart: No answer? Lisa, listen up.
    Yes, it’s the most cliched possible title to give a Zen-influenced work. This would probably have been less painfully obvious at the time, but I won’t say it isn’t problematic—honestly, it’s unclear whether White got much farther than Zen and the Art of Archery

“An authentic selfie”

However, warns Laurence Allard, a French professor and mobile technology specialist, the very name of the product itself might be self-limiting.

“It’s contradictory,” she says. “The selfie isn’t just a portrait. It has its own codes and rules, and the main one is that a selfie has to have been taken by hand. An authentic selfie should show it was taken with your arm extended—that’s a sort of signature.” And, she explains, the use of a selfie stick removes that particular element from the frame.
How the Selfie Stick is Killing the Selfie – LightBox

Today in “Are we sure Time hasn’t been replaced with The Onion” news, apparently now we are expected to ponder whether introducing a new layer of technological mediation between the photographer and their camera (i.e., ATTACHING IT TO A GODDAMN STICK) may jeopardize the authenticity of selfies.

This is ridiculous. I understand wanting to push back against the jerks who refuse to shut up about how selfies are ruining photography. But if there is one area where photography does not have to worry about receiving academic validation and legitimation of its “authenticity,” one area where the photograph can proceed free of any anxiety over its seriousness and its intellectual genealogy, surely it’s selfies. COME ON.

Or maybe there is not and never will be space in photography which can be free from demands for legitimation, because if we stop proving photography is an art in every moment we trip a shutter, we’ll all have to give up our Art Cards and admit we just like playing with cameras.