It's not for what it is, but for what else it is.
Who/What/When/Where?
An American photographer (July 1908 - June 1976), born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned a degree in botany with a minor in English, yet his first strides of creativity were with poetry. Upon creating a collective sequence of 100 sonnets, his photography career started after moving to Portland, Oregon, joining the Oregon Camera Club and completing assignments from the Works Progress Administration.
It was after his military service Minor White moved to New York City, spending two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University. It was here his involvement with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams came into play, developing his own style under the influence of these fellow photographers.
Concept - Connected ideas/references/personal / Meaning - point of view/message/metaphor/symbolism
Stieglitz's idea of 'equivalents' was a crucial role to Minor White's style, complimenting his interest in psychology. The theory is where images represent something other than the subject that is photographed, which very much resonated with White's poetic nature. White's own 'equivalents' were often of doorways, water, the sky, peeling walls; objects usually considered mundane. Yet aesthetically, the quality of the light and the way in which they were photographed made them differ. One of his images, Beginnings (Frosted Window), 1962, is an image of frost crystals on glass. However the objects within the frame are of secondary importance, leaving the formal and structural elements of the image to stir sentiment and emotional connection to the viewer, and the photographer. It's this recognitive 'atmosphere' that is the mirror to something else inside the viewer.
Minor White's description of a photographer, one who "... recognised an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield and image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself."
Structure - line, shape, form, texture, colour, balance, rhythm
Minor White was particular in how he wanted his photographs to be experienced, and to 'direct' the viewer he used a number of methods: creating symbols to represent emotions, accompanied his images with text, or placed his images in sequence.
Many of his images are of vivid, harsh textures and patterns, incomprehensible to real meaning at first glance. (Perhaps linked, psychologically, to the Rorschach test?). Real contemporary feel, with the aesthetic link to abstraction. A radical example is his image Surf, Vertical (San Mateo, California), 1947. Simply an overhead view of the ocean turned sideways to emphasise the abstractive qualities.
"Sometimes the complaint against ambiguous photographs is stated, "Art must never be a glorified Rorschach test!"Suggestibility is part of the foundations of human nature... The theory of Equivalence is a way for the photographer to deal with human suggestibility in a conscious and responsible way. It seems to me that to think of painting or photography as some degree of suggestibility is the very gate to the perennial trend in art. We must observe, of course, that a gate is not quite the same as a garden."
Equivalence: The Perennial Trend
Minor White, PSA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 7, pp. 17-21, 1963
Minor White emphasised that the personal process to photography, its link to our own subjectivity, infused a sense of creativity to the use of land as art. The juxtaposition of art to our own psyche.
Historical/Theoretical context - comparative to historical or contemporary practitioners/situation
Not only is it that abstract work, very much like many of Minor White's photographs, is subjective to the perception driven by the viewer, but then more abstract a photograph is the more reliant we are on the viewer to create meaning to it. His/her imagination, life experiences, state of mind - all these things play a crucial role to what each individual may perceive.
The abstractive pieces of "Equivalence" rely on imagination, and different perceptions more than likely came about, however Minor White was not fond of all viewers:
"And we observe that all to often the persons who cry "Sick, sick, sick" have no imagination. Or, for reasons obscure to them, they deliberately blind themselves to visual experiences that might disturb their basic insecurity. Consequently the full range of photographic possibilities of communication-evocation is a closed world to them."
Equivalence: The Perennial Trend
Minor White, PSA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 7, pp. 17-21, 1963
To continue with the receptivity of Minor White's audience, it seems to carry a potential harzard. "Without a capacity to see in rocks some glimmer of essential form, as Weston did, or in clouds some hint of universal life fore, as Stieglitz did, one cannot understand White's pictures." Current culture greatly affects an audience, especially one adjusted to icons of culture, rather than poetic nature and spirit.
http://www.sixfoot6.com/words/essays/minorwhite.htm
http://jnevins.com/whitereading.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/30/arts/photography-view-minor-white-s-quest-for-symbolic-significance.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
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