Minor White’s ‘Workshop of Emotions’

January 1974. Minor White is sixty-five years old and is visiting Italy for the first time in his life. He brings a group of MIT students with him and holds a workshop in Rome, taking them through the city’s streets. He photographs everything: the ruins and churches, the Campidoglio and the EUR district, Piazza del Popolo, the graffiti on the walls, the people. In the tourist hotspots, he practises his Zen approach. From a single image, he produces a large wall-sized print: the weathered colonnade of the Forum in the foreground, the pine trees, and above it all, the white of the Vittoriano towering over the scene. He never publishes it, nor does he write a single line about it in his diaries. It is kept at Princeton, and today it can be viewed online. Two years later, Time magazine dedicates an obituary to him that says it all, or almost all: “Minor White, aged 67, has died. A photographer whose dramatic landscapes, writings and teaching – in countless workshops and at MIT – made him one of the most influential artists of his generation. He died of a heart attack in Boston. He had wanted to be a poet, and never stopped writing free verse to accompany his photographs. His aim, he said, was to move ‘from the tangible to the intangible’: close-ups of rocks, driftwood smoothed by the sea and swirling waters were, for him, ‘inner landscapes’, metaphors for his own states of mind. And the photographs he grouped together – the ‘sequences’ – were to be viewed as a single work, in the manner of a succession of film frames.”

He was born in 1908. Not yet sixteen, he ran away from home after his parents discovered entries in his diary about what he himself called “homo-apprenticeship”. He returned a few months later, and the subject was never raised again within the family. He would write about it much later: realising that he would have to live a lie for the rest of his days was an enormous burden. He sought solace in the poetry of Walt Whitman. In ‘Calamus’, the section of *Leaves of Grass* in which the poet celebrates love between men, he glimpsed a way out of the question that was tormenting him: how can an ‘outlaw’ lead a decent, honest, useful, even ordinary life? Then he discovered that, in a letter to John Addington Symonds, Whitman had denied what his ‘city of friends’ stated quite plainly. This was his second disappointment, and from it sprang the promise he made to himself: to live exactly the sort of life his grandmother would have called ‘good’, simply to prove that a homosexual could do so. Decades later, he would note that, if asked whether one of his sequences dealt with homosexuality, he would beat about the bush for a long time before denying it, so as not to give rise to misunderstandings. Just like Whitman. The most explicit sequence, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors” (1948), was exhibited for the first time in 2014.

Nancy Newhall, critic and curator, friend and colleague, once called him the ‘Van Gogh of photography’, alluding to the pain and loneliness that marked his life. But the analogy also conveys something else: as with the Dutch painter, it is the need for salvation that gives substance to the images and dictates what White teaches. Many young photographers seek him out to learn a trade and end up somewhere else: his energy acts like a magnet, drawing them onto a path that is no longer technical but spiritual. One of the mantras repeated in his workshops is: ‘Do not photograph things merely for what they are, but also for what lies beyond them’.

The pilgrimage began with his conversion to Catholicism in 1942, a decision that had taken shape during his years of military service in the southern Philippines during the Second World War. Whilst his affiliation with the Church of Rome would wane, his quest would not: he turned to Christian mysticism as interpreted by Evelyn Underhill, then to Zen, and subsequently to working with the groups of Gurdjieff, the Armenian-Greek master who taught exercises to awaken from the slumber of ordinary consciousness. Fifty years after his death, White “is one of the most important American photographers you’ve never heard of”, as Katherine A. Bussard, photography curator at the Princeton University Art Museum and head of the artist’s archive, explains with a smile. The anniversary brings with it two very different exhibitions. The Fundación MAPFRE is dedicating the first European retrospective of this scale to him, curated by Carlos Gollonet: in Barcelona until 6 September, then in Madrid from 24 September to 10 January 2027. Meanwhile, at Princeton, “Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan” has opened, curated by Brendan Fay, which places him alongside the two colleagues with whom he shaped an American way of thinking about and teaching photography.

His points of reference have been clear since the 1930s: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams. But the figure who influences him most is not a photographer, but an actor and director. It is Richard Boleslawsky, the man behind what would become the Actors Studio, whose book "Acting: The First Six Lessons" provided White with the inspiration to develop his own method. For the director, authenticity on stage can arise from drawing on personal memories, and the actor is an ‘emotion maker’ – a creator of emotions that are constructed with restraint and skill. That lesson is etched into the first essay White published, "When Is Photography Creative?", in 1943. In it, he divides photographers into two groups: the expressive ones, inward-looking, who do not work for the viewer’s benefit; and the creative ones, who, on the other hand, aim to evoke emotions in others. Photography is not confession but construction. And the final chapter of Boleslawsky’s work, the one devoted to rhythm, provides him with the tool: orderly and measurable variations, which hold the viewer’s attention and guide it, without deviation, to where the artist has decided to lead it. The idea of photography as a workshop of emotions is already present in Stieglitz, who referred to his images of clouds as "equivalents": a photograph can be more than what it reproduces; it can serve as a visual equivalent of an emotional state. White met the master – founder of Gallery 291 and the magazine Camera Work – in New York in 1946. They spoke and looked at photographs together. The artist noted down just one exchange, in which Stieglitz asked him: “Have you ever been in love?”. Minor replied that he had. And Stieglitz, without adding anything further: “Then you can take photographs.” White would fully accept the most uncomfortable consequence of that approach – the one his detractors would hold against him: that his photographs were nothing more than luxury Rorschach tests. He did not deny it; instead, he turned the accusation on its head: suggestibility is not a flaw in the medium; it is the gateway to art.

In 1952, the public enterprise emerged from this private workshop. The magazine "Aperture" was launched in San Francisco, founded and initially funded by the photographers themselves: alongside White were, amongst others, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. Within a few years, it became a benchmark for what they called "serious photography" (read: neither commercial nor photojournalistic). But it was only one part of something much larger. Fay explains what linked White to his friends Siskind and Callahan as follows: “Not the style of the photographs, but the infrastructure they had to build”, so that by the 1950s people would regard a photograph as a work of art. All three found themselves running university programmes at a time when it was still unclear whether teaching photography meant training professionals or providing a humanities-based education through an artistic medium. All three chose the latter path. Not training for a trade, says Fay, but the time to understand why that medium mattered: a difficult proposition to sell to fee-paying students, then as now. And it worked: in the 1970s, university courses became the springboard for American photographic careers. With a paradoxical outcome, which Fay does not sugar-coat: that system ended up serving people whose work bore no resemblance whatsoever to that of Minor White.

In 1972, ‘Aperture’ published ‘Octave of Prayer’, a catalogue accompanying an exhibition at MIT, where White had been teaching since 1965. The title alludes to an eight-step scale of prayer, of the sort that Christian mysticism has codified for centuries: it begins with recited formulas and culminates in mystical union, that is, in silence. To ascend means to lose one’s points of reference, one by one: first the words, then the concepts, and finally the images. White maintains that photography functions only at the lowest levels, and that of the two thousand photographs submitted in response to an open call, only those “on prayer” and those “for meditation” deserve to be retained. He states the selection criterion without embarrassment: ‘radiant to the heart’, because judgement should shift from the head to the heart. Of his own work, he includes just one image in the volume and almost all the text. The scathing review appeared in March 1973 in the "Village Voice", penned by A. D. Coleman, who later became a critic for the "New York Times". The publication, he writes, proves that White has given up being a photographer and a teacher to become a priest of a religion all of his own, the ‘Cult of the Camera’: a visual banality so childish as to be offensive, held together by an intellectual Jesuitism that Coleman describes as arrogant, anti-creative and ‘proto-totalitarian’. And he dismisses him with a comparison that must have sounded scathing in 1973: he likens him to those Californian sects for whom the only sacrament is orange juice. The Village Voice refused to publish the second instalment of the controversy; Coleman resigned, and the piece appeared in full in Camera 35 in November, with White’s reply in the same issue. It was not that article, on its own, that extinguished his star. But from then on, White’s name began to circulate less frequently than those of his contemporaries, and he has never since regained the ground he lost.

Something seems to have changed. White’s spiritual dimension is “something to which, perhaps, we are now more open and more curious”, explains Bussard. But the reasons for his decline in prominence are not all critical in nature. One relates to his work: White “was so interested and so expansive in his thinking that at a certain point he ceased to be identifiable with any one type of photography”. Taking photographs, publishing them, theorising about them: all mattered equally to him, and those who cannot be pigeonholed are harder to remember. Bussard understood the other reason by examining the archives held by the museum. “Minor White paid the price for not having any heirs. The system is designed to support photographers with a conventional family – wives and heirs capable of asserting the value of the photographs, the estate and the archive’. But it was not merely a lack of descendants that held him back. He also lacked a single, powerful gallery that would bear his name for decades, as the Pace Gallery did for Harry Callahan. It is that commercial backbone that determines how visible a photographer remains. The resurgence of interest, if there is one, follows three paths. The first is that the 1973 trial was never quite what it seemed: Coleman, in republishing the scathing review in 2018, did not retract a single line, but was keen to point out that as a thinker, teacher, publisher and photographer, White made serious contributions to the medium – contributions which he valued then and continues to value now. The criticism was directed at ‘the priest’, never the photographer. Then there is the unabridged publication of "Memorable Fancies", on which Todd Cronan worked for five years: previously, Bussard estimates, no more than two dozen people had read that diary in its entirety. And there are the young people. At the Princeton symposium, authors such as David Benjamin Sherry and Dionne Lee spoke of White as one of those ‘on whose shoulders they have stood’. Many teach at universities, and White features in their syllabuses.

The grand finale of the exhibition at the Fundación MAPFRE, which presents White’s key sequences in grand style, is “Slow Dance”, the only colour sequence she ever exhibited during her lifetime. These double-projected slides, born of her interest in movement and Gurdjieff’s dances, were at the time more akin to a performance than an exhibition. It had remained in the archive until it was reconstructed by Brendan Fay. The images, presented here in digital form to preserve the extremely delicate originals, melt into one another. Candy-pink, chocolate browns, the bluest of blues: colours that are at once real and impossible. The reflections on the wet surfaces have an almost tactile quality. Bussard considers it one of the joys of recent years: “It seems to have nothing to do with the other images we associate with Minor White”. On his death, he left his house in Arlington to “Aperture”, his personal effects to Gurdjieff’s group of followers in Boston, and his entire archive to Princeton. Three lives divided amongst three recipients, from a man who never wanted to be just one thing.

Whilst he was alive, he visited Italy only once. After his death, he returned on two occasions: with the monograph "Riti e passaggi", published by Giovanni Chiaramonte for Jaca Book in 1992, and with the exhibition that Filippo Maggia dedicated to him in 2001 in Modena and Milan, "Life is Like a Cinema of Stills". Today, the retrospective is in Spain. Bussard says they are working on a third European venue, and the Princeton exhibition will tour the United States until 2028. “Not yet,” she replies when asked about Italy. “We’d very much like to bring it to you.” Meanwhile, the large-format print of the photograph of the Forum remains where it is, in Princeton. No one has ever seen it displayed in an exhibition.