Cathy, I appreciated your sensitive and well-researched overview of White's photography and views. Minor had a sense of humor as well. Once, as an inexperienced and pretty incompetent photographer, I framed a set of stairs in the viewfinder. Minor appeared suddenly from the right with a cheese sandwich and a drink in a styrofoam cup. "Wait!" he said, moving quickly into the frame and placing his sandwich on top of the cup on the top step. Just as gingerly (I believe he was 76 at the time) he moved out of the frame. "You need something to key it in." While he was correct, I always interpreted that little interchange as him having a bit of fun with me. I exchanged letters with him a few times after that workshop. Once I wrote to him, seeking a venue for my young, over-charged energy, "How do you pull the cork out of the bottle?" "First," he wrote back, "are you inside the bottle or outside the bottle?" Turns out there was no bottle. Really, it turns out there was no me. White at the time was Professor Emeritus of Creative Photography at M.I.T., a consultant to the Polaroid Corporation, and the author, with Hollis Todd and Richard Zakiah of "The New Zone System Manual," a book with which I wrestled for a couple of years after realizing that my photographs were, in Minor's words, "...exactly what I would expect from a twenty-year-old." Good that he told the truth. Digital is great, but has to some extent de-emphasized the moment. It's as though we have limitless, relatively cheap film to shoot-- not the same as trekking for a few hours with a heavy tripod and Mamiya 67 on one's shoulder and only two frames left in the film back. In that case, one shoots very carefully so as not to waste the precious film. Yet that sort of focus, if you will, can be approached with digital as well if the photographer will study the medium sufficiently to be reasonably fluent, as a jazz musician does their instrument, and then to approach the subject open to the joy of discovering the unexpected, with a willingness to improvise and learn from the subject as well as an awareness of one's own role in the process. Some photographers depend too heavily on excessive alteration of the image in the post-processing phase. Minor really emphasized pre-visualization as a tool. He had us sketch subjects and assign tonal values to them, only then were we to use our cameras to attempt to actually produce an image that reflected accurately-- or as accurately as our skills would allow-- the values we had pre-assigned to the various luminances in the subject. At that time, we worked with Polaroid black and white film-- 4" x 5". Beautiful stuff that "film." Pearlescent. Difficult to approach that tonality today with digital, but I'm not one who laments at not smelling like glacial acetic acid after a bout of post-processing. Nope. I embrace the digital. So, thanks for the heartfelt essay and for sharing your own work courageously alongside White's.
I was lucky enough to photograph with Minor at Capital Reef, Utah in the mid 1960's. I was a professional documentary film maker and still photographer at the time. I have some of his work.
+Brian McQuain Equivalence was Stieglitz's idea, which White adopted-- the idea that a photographer in a state of heightened awareness who follows through with his initial, pre-visualized concept, attempting to re-create the state present at the time of the photograph while subsequently processing the photograph-- bringing the print to faithful fruition-- might create the possiblity in the viewer of the re-engenerment of that same state-- objective art after a fashion.
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Thanks so much for this gift Cathy!
Cathy, I appreciated your sensitive and well-researched overview of White's photography and views. Minor had a sense of humor as well. Once, as an inexperienced and pretty incompetent photographer, I framed a set of stairs in the viewfinder. Minor appeared suddenly from the right with a cheese sandwich and a drink in a styrofoam cup. "Wait!" he said, moving quickly into the frame and placing his sandwich on top of the cup on the top step. Just as gingerly (I believe he was 76 at the time) he moved out of the frame. "You need something to key it in."
While he was correct, I always interpreted that little interchange as him having a bit of fun with me.
I exchanged letters with him a few times after that workshop. Once I wrote to him, seeking a venue for my young, over-charged energy, "How do you pull the cork out of the bottle?"
"First," he wrote back, "are you inside the bottle or outside the bottle?" Turns out there was no bottle. Really, it turns out there was no me.
White at the time was Professor Emeritus of Creative Photography at M.I.T., a consultant to the Polaroid Corporation, and the author, with Hollis Todd and Richard Zakiah of "The New Zone System Manual," a book with which I wrestled for a couple of years after realizing that my photographs were, in Minor's words, "...exactly what I would expect from a twenty-year-old." Good that he told the truth.
Digital is great, but has to some extent de-emphasized the moment. It's as though we have limitless, relatively cheap film to shoot-- not the same as trekking for a few hours with a heavy tripod and Mamiya 67 on one's shoulder and only two frames left in the film back. In that case, one shoots very carefully so as not to waste the precious film.
Yet that sort of focus, if you will, can be approached with digital as well if the photographer will study the medium sufficiently to be reasonably fluent, as a jazz musician does their instrument, and then to approach the subject open to the joy of discovering the unexpected, with a willingness to improvise and learn from the subject as well as an awareness of one's own role in the process.
Some photographers depend too heavily on excessive alteration of the image in the post-processing phase. Minor really emphasized pre-visualization as a tool. He had us sketch subjects and assign tonal values to them, only then were we to use our cameras to attempt to actually produce an image that reflected accurately-- or as accurately as our skills would allow-- the values we had pre-assigned to the various luminances in the subject. At that time, we worked with Polaroid black and white film-- 4" x 5".
Beautiful stuff that "film." Pearlescent. Difficult to approach that tonality today with digital, but I'm not one who laments at not smelling like glacial acetic acid after a bout of post-processing. Nope. I embrace the digital.
So, thanks for the heartfelt essay and for sharing your own work courageously alongside White's.
I was lucky enough to photograph with Minor at Capital Reef, Utah in the mid 1960's. I was a professional documentary film maker and still photographer at the time.
I have some of his work.
Where did you find the information of his Theory of Equivalence?
+Brian McQuain Equivalence was Stieglitz's idea, which White adopted-- the idea that a photographer in a state of heightened awareness who follows through with his initial, pre-visualized concept, attempting to re-create the state present at the time of the photograph while subsequently processing the photograph-- bringing the print to faithful fruition-- might create the possiblity in the viewer of the re-engenerment of that same state-- objective art after a fashion.
White explains himself this on his essay "Equivalence: the perennial trend"
Disturbing music toothless !!