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Who Was Clarence H. White?, February 16, 2009
This review is from: Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography (Hardcover)
There is not a great deal of published material available about pioneer American Photographer Clarence H. White or the photography schools he founded. White discovered photography in what was then considered the Wild West of Newark Ohio in the 1890's.
This book does much to fill in that obvious gap in the history of Art Photography. The authors Bonnie Yochelson and Kathleen A. Erwin painstakingly document the development of this self-taught "Western Frontier Photographer." How a man working as a book keeper could plan his pictures while working long hours six days a week as an accountant for a grocery and dry goods wholesale business is an interesting story all by itself. His friends who volunteered to model for his art photographs often had to rise before dawn just to get the chosen locations so that the light would be as envisioned by White during his painstaking planning and rehearsal process. One of the reasons for this was because he could often afford only one film plate per week so he only had one chance to capture each situation.
Clarence H. White was a "Pictorialist" who felt that photography should be beautiful enough to be regarded as a true art form. He was a founding member of The Photo-Secession Group. He and a close-friend F. Holland Day were two of the leading voices for classifying photography as an art. After forging new standards for his own work, White decided to move to NYC and opened an art photography school in 1914. He never made much money with either his photography or his teaching, but he did influence the entire field of Pictorial Photography.
White was a very "open minded" individual and preached that philosophy to all his students as well. He felt keeping an open mind would enable people to see the beauty that was all around them, but usually just taken for granted. At the time of early death in 1925, White was ranked with Alfred Stieglitz in importance to photographic history. Unlike Stieglitz, White didn't feel that women could not make important contributions to the art of photography other than by posing in front of the camera. That is why so many of the White School's most accomplished and remembered photographers were women. They realized that at White's School of Photography they would be treated as equals and given the respect they and their work were due. Among the better known female icons of photography that attended Whites School were Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White (no relation) and Lee Miller to name only a few of the most famous.
Included in the this coffee table book published by George Eastman House and Rizzoli International Publications, are many beautiful reproductions of the platinum prints so favored by White, his contemporaries and his Pictorialist students. Most of them are purposely shot with soft lenses to make them appear warm and fuzzy. White strongly favored pictures of family life in a kind of "Norman Rockwell" Americana style. Among my favorite photographs in the books are samples of the many beautiful nudes from the earliest days of photography. Naturally I liked the examples by White, Stieglitz, Karl Struss, Wynn Richards, Paul Outerbridge Jr., but also the nudes taken by other women students including Jane Reece and most especially one by Anne W. Brigman entitled "Invictus, 1025," whose work I wasn't previously familiar with.
The book is blessed with many fine examples of the work of White and his students in all facets of subject matter and once again, women are well represented in the portfolio. As the book moves from the Pictorialism into Modernism many of the photographs are no longer platinum prints but sharper black and white and color images.
This is a very helpful book about Clarence H. White and his style of photography and the schools he founded. While it is not discussed in this volume, the Ohio University Photography Department run by White's son Clarence H. White Jr. is set up on the Clarence H. White School of Photography model. As a BFA graduate of that program, I hadn't realized that fact until reading this book. It makes perfect sense. The other most helpful sources of information about White are probably "Clarence H. White (The Aperture History of Photography Series #11)" and the two biographies of F. Holland Day. Day's invitation to the entire White Family to spend part of their summers at his home on the Maine Seacoast making photographs with fellow like-minded photographers had an enormous influence on Clarence H. White and his entire family. Many of White's Best Photographs appear to have been taken in a Maine setting. The material in this book is not easy to find elsewhere. And like an invitation to seek out, White's grandson "Maynard Pressley White Jr. using materials collected by Jane Felix White," wrote a dissertation on White if one really wants to go digging
for more information on Clarence H. White.
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