Minor White
1949
Columbus Avenue, San Francisco

Gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 9 7/8 ins
 
Princeton University Art Museum
Reproduced with permission of the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.
 
The wall statement for a White exhibition curated for the George Eastman House by Walter Chappell said: "This photographer releases the shutter while looking at things for what else they are, and later refl ects on the photographic image for what else it is. Why? Because this is the way to use camera work to mirror inner life. This is the way of what Alfred Stieglitz called Equivalents. Because this is the liberating discipline by which photographs become turning points between man and nature and looking glasses that can be walked into. Only half the story is given in photographs and words. The other half, as 11th century Chinese painters believed, is given by the viewer as he completes the images in his mind. What he remembers later is his own. . . . In payment of promises made to Walt Whitman and acknowledgments of invoices from Donne, Emily Dickinson and Blake; Freud, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and I Ching."
 
Wall label from Sequence 13 Return to the Bud, curated by Walter Chappell during the spring of 1959 at George Eastman House, Minor White Archive, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.
 
LL/33302