MinorWhite

Minor White was born on July 9, 1908 in Minneapolis. He was a homosexual and enjoyed taking pictures of naked men near the begining of his career, he also took landscaping pictures. He got a degree in Botany from the University of Minnesota in 1934, and moved a little after to Portland, Oregon. There he began his career in photography, taking on assignments from the Works Progress Administration and putting his work in the Portland Art Museum. War was a big inspiration for him. After serving in military intelligence in World War II, he moved to New York City in 1945. He spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University and then her developed his own distinct, individual style. He then became involved with a circle of prominent and powerful photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. He heard about Stieglitz's idea of "equivalents" from the master himself, it was crucial to the direction of White's developed post-war work. The "equivalents" of White were often photographs of barns, doorways, water, the sky, or simple paint peeling on a wall: things usually considered ordinary. He first used a 35mm camera. He had many contributions to photography, such as, all his photos and exhibits. Also all the classes he taught. In 1953 he left California to teach at the Rochester Institute of Technology. In 1965 he was appointed professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Cambridge, where he stayed until his death in 1976. Throughout his entire career Minor White gave courses, but once a year he taught intensive summer workshops just about everywhere in the United States. This allowed him to influence a bigger number of students from a wide variety of backgrounds, which was another contribution to photography (introducing and teaching it to others). He died on June 24, 1976.

Photographs [|Road and Poplar Trees] [|Moon & Wall Encrustations]

Bibliography http://www.glbtq.com/arts/white_m.html

Two famous photos from him are the Frost on Window in 1952, a close-up of frost crystals on glass, []

And Song without Words in 1960. []