Clarence White
I never paid much attention to pictorialism when I was younger. My standard disclaimer when people wanted me to photograph things was “I don’t do fuzzies.” Now, I find myself captivated by the transition between pictorialism and modernism. I think part of the problem is my distaste for Steiglitz; the more I read about him, the more I find out what a misogynist misanthrope he really was. The weird thing, researching it now, is figuring out that Clarence White, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Steiglitz basically lived in the same area of New York at the same time. Their aesthetic and personal proclivities couldn’t be more different.
Interestingly, White and Coburn changed with the times whereas Steiglitz kind of went into stasis. Traditional surveys of the history of photography talk mostly about Steiglitz; one quickly figures out when you read much about him, why O’Keefe ended up in the desert. To grow, you really had to get away from the man either physically or psychically. White was a teacher who never really left pictorialism behind the way Steiglitz and Coburn did; but what White got away from was the notion of the “artist” popularized by Steiglitz and Coburn. White’s primary impact was as a teacher who was able to reconcile conflicting trends in artistic practice in his curriculum—by teaching them as tools suited for different “problems.”
White never devalued or berated anyone. He taught small classes, primarily composed of women. He thought photography was a profession well-suited for women. He interestingly seems to have developed quite a “queer contingent” around him too. I wish I knew more about him, but most books which deal with him are focused mostly on the impact of his school. He’s another name on the list of books that need to be written—along with (oddly enough) Dorothea Lange, who deserves a truly detailed scholarly biography. Most books on either of these people are skeletons, begging for some flesh.
All I’ve really managed to do is whet my appetite for information on White by constructing a slight skeleton of my own on my research site. I’ll do Lange eventually, but before I do that, I also need to deal more fully with Doris Ulmann. The figures in photography that interest me most right now are the ones who thought that photography could have an impact beyond creating decorations to hang over the sofa. The pictorialists, much to my surprise, actually did have more impact than the staunch modernists. They provide an interesting counterpoint to the emerging photojournalists because they were design-centered rather than content-centered. They actually tried to strike a balance between the two, at least towards the end of the movements tenure.
