Minor White

In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of photo giant Minor White's birth, this volume features seminal works spanning his entire career. White's contribution to photography was formidable; in addition to being a master craftsman, he was also a highly influential writer, critic, curator, editor and teacher. During the 1950s and 60s, White's house in Rochester, New York, served as an important meeting place for a number of photographers as well as the editorial offices of Aperture magazine, which White founded in 1952 with Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall.
Born in 1908 in Minneapolis, Minor White created his first major photographs in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, for the Works Progress Administration. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Portland Art Museum in 1942. Over the course of his long career, White held positions at the California School of Fine Arts, the George Eastman House, the Rochester Institute of Technology and, from 1965 until his death in 1976, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His photographs are in the principal collections of Princeton University, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The J. Paul Getty and Norton Simon museums in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Minor White is one of the greatest of photographers. I do not make this statement lightly ...The sheer beauty of the medium of photography is tuned to the exact meaning of the visualized image. --Ansel Adams

This selection of Minor White's superb photographs is accompanied by extensive, revealing excerpts from White's letters and amplified by James Baker Hall's perceptive observations of the artist-teacher at work.