(July, 9, 1908, USA – June, 25, 1976, USA)
(photo @Eric Myrvaagnes)Minor Martin White was a founding American photographer for the Aperture magazine.
His grandfather was fond of photography and at the age of six or seven they gave him a Brownie camera with which he was taking photos until his adolescence. He graduated in botany from the University of Minnesota between 1928 and 1933 and began writing poetry but did not get the results he hoped for and did not have enough money to spend taking photographs. In 1938 he moved to Portland where he worked as a night watchman in a hotel while during the day he worked in a photo lab affiliated with the Works Progress Administration. He joined the Oregon Camera Club and had the opportunity to exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art. After completing his military service, he moved to New York in 1945 and studied art at Columbia University. He made friends with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and in 1946 he went to San Francisco as an assistant to Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts, where he had C. Cameron Macauley as a student.
The influence of Stieglitz and direct photography together with his high command of photographic technique led him to define “photography as a mirage” and to confer on the image an internal meaning that is different from what is apparent.4 Another of his theoretical contributions refers to the importance of what the photographer accidentally encounters that is exposed in his work Found photograpy.
In 1952 he founded the magazine Aperture that in his first issue he carried a photograph of Dorothea Lange on the cover and included two articles, one on the photographic capture of Nancy Newhall and another written by himself on photography with small cameras. Soon after, he moved to Rochester to collaborate with Beaumont Newhall at the George Eastman House. Between 1956 and 1964 he was teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology and among his students were Paul Caponigro and Jerry Uelsmann. Later he was teaching photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his last days.
Some of his Photos
You might also like
