Learning from Minor White

Minor White was fond of St. Catherine of Siena’s observation: “All the way to heaven is heaven, for He said, I AM the way.” I am not qualified to offer a theological interpretation of this statement, but I will offer a simple analogy with my own understanding of the medium in which I work. Which is that the making of photographs, the visual, intuitive, and lively conversation with light and the things of the world, the ongoing and evolving dialogue that is mediated by the camera, matters every bit as much as the pictures that emerge from that exchange. I believe that you devote yourself to making images because of what you put into the process, not just what you get out of it.

Ad Reinhardt remarked: “Looking is not as simple as it looks.” To speak of “taking” pictures reduces photography to petty theft. I think the challenge for the serious photographer is to take a medium that can be used so simply and with such little thought or feeling, and to invest it with vision, discovery, rigor, and meaning.

Minor also spoke quite often about what else an object or an image might be, or what it might become through seeing it as more than a commonly understood signifier of identity. Centuries earlier, William Blake referred to the same idea when he wrote about two-fold and three-fold vision. It is easy to dismiss such ideas. Hardboiled pragmatism is the supreme virtue of many, while cleverness and cynicism seem to satisfy most of the rest. But it is the insight and imagination of Blake and White that I most wish to honor through my own work.

Another one of many things I learned from Minor White is the importance of sequencing. That is to say, the order in which multiple photographs are seen, the relationships that can be created/discovered between one image and the next, and throughout a body of work. Nothing in the universe stands alone. And as the American poet, George Oppen said, “Things explain each other, not themselves.” Each picture is influenced by the context of others in its company.