Minor White
Minor White
Minor Martin Whitewas an American photographer, theoretician, critic and educator. He combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies. Starting in Oregon in 1937 and continuing until he died in 1976, White made thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes, people and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow. He taught...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth9 July 1908
CountryUnited States of America
The development of a love of medium and a responsibility for one's own pictures is an overall goal.
The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.
Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.
I have often photographed when I am not in tune with nature but the photographs look as if I had been. So I conclude that something in nature says, 'Come and take my photograph.' So I do, regardless of how I feel.
Sometimes we work so fast that we don't really understand what's going on in front of the camera. We just kind of sense that, 'Oh my God, it's significant!' and photograph impulsively while trying to get the exposure right. Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images.
Watching the way the current moves a blade of grass - sometimes I've seen that happen and it has just turned me inside out.
Reaching a 'creative' state of mind thru positive action is considered preferable to waiting for 'inspiration'.
It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.
We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.
Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.
If I have anything to give you through camera, it must be of myself. … A gnawing burns inside … to make something of myself worth giving.
Different levels of photography require different levels of understanding and skill. A "press the button, let George do the rest" photographer needs little or no technical knowledge of photography. A zone system photographer takes more responsibility. He visualizes before he presses the button, and afterwards calibrates for predictable print values.
Some of the young photographers today enter photography where I leave off. My "grandchildren" astound me. What I worked for they seem to be born with. So I wonder where Their affirmations of Spirit will lead. My wish for them is that their unfolding proceeds to fullness of Spirit, however astonishing or anguished their lives.
We emphasized the creativeness that happens at the moment of seeing over the kind that takes place in the dark room.