Text from The Encyclopedia of Photography (1986)

White, Minor
American, 1908-1976

John Szarkowski has written, "Of those photographers who reached their creative maturity after the Second World War, none has been more influential than Minor White.... White's influence has depended not only on his own work as a photographer but on his services as teacher, critic, publisher and housemother for a large portion of the community of serious photographers."

White was known for his belief, influenced by Oriental philosophy, in the sacred and spiritual quality of photography. While his own work won him international acclaim, White devoted himself to bringing the work of countless other photographers before the public eye, and to achieving broad public recognition of photography as an art form.

White was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended public schools and became interested in photography as a young boy. He received a B.S. degree in botany, with a minor in English, from the University of Minnesota in 1933.

From 1933 to 1938 he worked as a hotel clerk in Portland, Oregon, where he was active in the Oregon Camera Club, photographing, exhibiting, and teaching. In 1939 he worked as a "creative photographer" for the Works Progress Administration photographing the Portland waterfront and iron-facade buildings. In 1940-1941 he taught photography and directed the La Grande Art Center in eastern Oregon. His first article, "When Is Photography Creative?," appeared in American Photography in 1943.

White participated in the Image of Freedom exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1941. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Portland Art Museum in 1942.

From 1942 to 1945 White served in the United States Army Intelligence Corps. Unable to photograph regularly, he devoted much time to writing "Eight Lessons in Photography." He was baptized a Catholic by an Army chaplain in 1943. Zen, Gestalt psychology, and the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff became other important spiritual influences in the course of his life.

After his discharge, White moved to New York City where he studied aesthetics under art historian Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. He also worked with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall and as a photographer at the Museum of Modern Art, and he met Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Paul Strand at this time.

White joined the photography faculty at the California School of Fine Arts, headed by Ansel Adams, in 1946. He developed close ties with Adams and Weston. Around this time he began to experiment with photographic sequences for wall exhibition.

With Adams, Dorothea Lange, the Newhalls, Barbara Morgan, and others, White founded Aperture quarterly, of which he was editor, in 1952. He directed the How to Read a Photograph exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1953. The same year he joined the staff of George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, where he was curator of exhibitions for four years and editor of Image magazine in 1956-1957. Among the shows he directed during these years were Camera Consciousness (1954), The Pictorial Image (1955), and Lyrical and Accurate (1956). A large exhibition of his own work, Sequence 131 Return to the Bud, was held at George Eastman House in 1959.

In 1955 White taught briefly at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He resigned as assistant curator of Eastman House and was appointed to the RIT faculty in 1956. At this time he began the influential workshops he would conduct throughout the country for the rest of his life.

In 1962 White was a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education. In 1965 he was made Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT, where he continued to teach and organize exhibitions, including Light 7. He was promoted to tenured professorship in 1969.

A major one-man traveling show of White's work originated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1970. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the same year.

White retired from the faculty of MIT in 1974, but was appointed Senior Lecturer and became a Fellow of the MIT Council of Arts in 1975. He resigned as editor of Aperture the same year. His first major European traveling exhibition was also presented in 1975.

In 1976 White became a consulting editor of Parabola magazine and received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. He died of a heart attack in Boston in June, 1976. His archives are now in the Library of Princeton University.