Minor White
American photographer, 1908–1976
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
American designer, painter, and illustrator, 1873–1957
American artist, educator, art historian, and critic, born 1935
Minor White
BiographyModern photographer Minor White was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He graduated with a degree in botany and a minor in English from University of Minnesota. He began his photography career after moving to Portland, Oregon in 1938. After serving in military intelligence during World War II, White settled in New York. He studied at Columbia with art historian Meyer Shapiro and became involved with a circle of talented photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. White adapted Stieglitz's idea of "equivalents," producing photographs of specific objects through which he sought to convey emotional and spiritual states. From 1946 to 1953 he taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In 1952 he was one of the founders of the magazine Aperture, and the following year he moved to Rochester, New York, teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology from 1956 to 1964. He later taught at MIT. His famous students include Paul Caponigro and Jerry Uelsmann.
