on photography, language and universality

“Photography is a language more universal than words.”

Minor White

Ritual Brach

By Minor White

on grouping

“It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.”

Minor White

on photographs and Selves

“When I looked at things for what they are, I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self.”

Minor White

on photography and aesthetics

“. . .we are so conditioned to painting as the criterion of the visual aesthetic experience that the possibility of a photograph’s being another path to aesthetic experience, like a piece of sculpture or a poem, has been overlooked or not realised – if not actually denied or pushed out of the realm of possibilities.”

Minor White

Self-discovery through a camera?

“Self-discovery through a camera? I am scared to look for fear of discovering how shallow my Self is! I will persist however … because the camera has its eye on the exterior world. Camera will lead my constant introspection back into the world. So camerawork will save my life.”

Minor White

Postopone judgment!

“Postpone judgment! When starting to read, experience or take part in a photograph (or picture of any kind) first put aside both like and dislike. Leave criticism to the last, or better still forget to criticize.”

Minor White and Walter Chappell, from “Some Methods for Experiencing Photographs”, Aperture,

vol 5, no 4, 1957

Minor White on photographs

“At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.”

Minor White

Minor White on photography

“Photographers, when you get accosted by painters, who, in their innocence, revive that tiresome old argument that Photography is not an art (which is true), reply that Painting is not an art. This last is also true.

Painting and photography, sculpture and photography, pottery and photography are only media, vehicles, pushmobiles, laundry chutes that get an intangible something from one unfindable part pf one man to an unlocatable part of another person. And the ineffable something is not an art because to name it implies that art is an object, or a thing, or a biscuit, or a building that can be moved about and grasped with the hands. As many have said there is no art, only artists. Every creative photographer has to find out for himself that it’s the man behind the camera that is the artist, or not – wearisome as this may be to those who have gone through the process.”

Minor White, from “That Old Question Again”,

Aperture, vol 7, no 1, 1959