American photographer, Minor White (1908~1976), was one of the most influential, and naked photographers in the postwar period. He lived his life through almost forty years of creative image making. His abstract images show his peak moment of a photographer's inner visions, which created, and attracted "White mania" through the 1960's (Rosenblum 519). He was also a founder and an editor of Aperture, a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Hoffman 3). Not only are his photographs constructed and framed with the aesthetic and stylistic structures of ready made, found abstract objects from nature and the man made world, they are also very spiritual and poetic; however, White's ideas did not stop there. Although the influences of Straight photography, Abstract Expressionism, Equivalent, and the Zone System were important to him, I believe that his experience and private path played a big role in his creative visions. By understanding his homosexuality, and his Roman Catholic background in the age of denial and discrimination between 1940's and 1970's, one should see his emotional drama and deep loneliness. I also began seeing homoerotic subtexts and desires of ecstasy everywhere in his images after realizing his struggles and problematic background. His images reflect his personal history and disclosures. Human pathos is there to be discovered.

Minor White himself once said, " The camera must report a revitalization. It must revitalize an experience. Somehow it must bring the poetic experience to the surface. It must report a revitalization of a personality if it is to achieve full stature,"(Bunnell 29)

White studied poetry before getting involved with photography. This must be why his photographs are meant to be read and felt, rather than just being viewed. It seems that his love of poetry never died even after changing his medium, since his visions seem to share the same language as poetry. Just like Ansel Adams studied music before turning to a master of landscape photographer, Adams's music background influenced his photographic style with a calm classical experience; therefore, the background of White's poetry should not be ignored. His knowledge and correspondence of poetry and photography gave his prints a visual and mystical mood and harmony. White described, "In becoming a photographer I am only changing mediums. The essential core of both verse and photography is both poetry, and I have felt the taste of poetry,"(Bunnelle 16) While White's images show that he was comfortable using his new medium, he still leaves his psychological and metaphoric marks; his fears, desires, and tensions are present in his photographs. Although it is not clear why he chose photography as his medium, I think that his choice has a relationship with his taboo desires towards men.

Being and living as a gay man must have been quite difficult and problematic during his lifetime. One must understand that this was the postwar period. This was the time before Robert Mapplethorpe's highly sexual photographs. It was also the time of Existentialism when Jackson Pollock was dripping his paint all over canvases, making his mark through the holistic web. My research of White's biographical chronology revealed that he had a sad experience when his family reading his diary, in which he had recorded his homosexual feelings when he was eighteen years old. White later described it as a brief crisis, following which he leaves home for the summer of 1927(Bunnelle 16). Although it is unknown whether similar incidents had happened again with his family or friends, this incident alone could have had a big impact and mental strain on White, causing him to struggle with his guilt and hide his feelings more and more. White might have felt that he was an outsider. As he grew older, he wanted to release his desires somewhere. After all, he was a human being. White could not or did not want to use the form of literature anymore from his fears of being condemned. In search of his ecstasy, he found his new passion, photography. By changing his medium to a camera, he did not have to expose himself to "illiterate viewers". White probably thought that poetry was too easy for everyone to understand his points, and photography was more suited to disclosing his private feelings. By capturing and showing his images, he was able to have his orgasm. In White's journal, "Memorable Fancies", he writes, "Those who are perceptive enough to read the meaning at the heart of my photographs will probably be sympathetic enough to forgive me." (Bunnelle 20). While Robert Mapplethorpe did not feel any guilt showing extreme gay contents in his images to gay audiences during the 1970s and 1980s, Minor White was a rather shy and complex photographer with lots of conflicts in his mind.

Windowsill Daydreaming, Rochester, N.Y. (1958) would be the most famous in all of White's photographs. It can also be found in the Special Collections at California State University, Long Beach which owns twelve original black and white photographs by Minor White. The image of early morning sunlight pouring through a window was probably captured with a sharp lens, and his new 4 x 5 Sinar view camera that he purchased in the same year (Bunnelle 9). This is also the moment of the sublime with a celebration of light! I believe that this image alone can explain everything about his photographic style. This is the image in which White applied all of his knowledge, and seeking correspondences with everything to express his inner life. The image is constructed with a few ordinary elements, the open window, round reflected sunlight on the wall, shadows cast from unknown objects, and a curtain. While White was following Stieglietz's theory of Equivalence, where images stand for something other than subject matter, and shapes relate to one another, it is important to ignore his subject matter when one reads his photographs; thus, this was not just a picture of a window and sunlight. It also did not matter which and whose window it was because he was not documenting the event in any specific location. White was known to obliterate clues to size and geographic locale, giving his images an enigmatic quality (Rosenblum 519). He was more interested in his personal vision and the feeling one gets from various shapes in his image. One must observe all the elements in the image as shapes of abstraction. Now his ordinary objects have transformed to something extraordinary.

Windiwsill daydreaming, 1958
Scan courtesy of Masters of Photography

Here White did something more than what Stieglitz did. He added atmosphere and breathing space in his image. He opened possibilities of pure straight photography with his poetic style. Can you feel the air? Can you hear the sound of silence from this photograph? This breathing space and sublime light remind me of the paintings by color field painter, Mark Rothko. Although "Windowsill Daydreaming" is a black and white image, and not a color photograph, it still shares the same kind of mood and emotional reaction as if I were experiencing Rothko's infinite light. White's photograph also had a soft-feathered edge of light and shadows in the reflected light on the wall, which evokes "an out of body experience" and "ideal spiritual space". White's influence of Transcendentalism and his search for the sublime can also be found in the use of the Zone system developed by Ansel Adams and the members of Group f.64, such as Edward Weston.

The photographic style of Adams involved pre-visualizing the images, having an extremely sharp focus and concept, controlling the light, shadow, and tonality. Group f.64 was known to push and fine-tune the straight photography to fine art, which was introduced by Stieglietz. This new approach by the masters of photography led to the same highest meaning, "the peak moment". White also had the peak moment in terms of his technical side, as well as a psychological side of photography. This must have been the "point" that White too wanted to express with his play of light and pattern.

From my experience and understanding, it is quite a difficult task to capture the morning sunlight reflected on a wall at the right moment, since the sunlight changes its form and angle every second. By the time I realize the peak moment and finish preparing a camera and a tripod, the magical light show is usually over. My physical reaction is gone... Thus, having sharp focus and precise exposure with such a fast moving object must have been the climactic moment for White. Just like Cartier Bresson's "The Decisive Moment", White was able to adjust himself to record the best face of the sunlight at the perfect time.

White's use of abstract elements of lines in the sunlight, rhythm of the shape, and texture of the curtain all played a big role in the image. They also helped construct an image with the use of metaphoric presence. The experience I had with the image was very quiet, spiritual and also erotic. In my opinion, this is an image of lovemaking and the spiritual moment of ecstasy. The soft edged sunlight and the curtain can be read as the spiritual sublime moment, or "climax" of the image. The dancing shadows in the reflected lights also remind me of Franz Kline's magnified gestures and marks, which he used to express his inner being. I could read these forms as the two males being intimate... I can see bodies, heads, arms, legs, and also their penises, moving and enjoying their multiple ecstasies. Interestingly, the opened window helps viewers breathe and rest from such an intense moment in the subtext of this seemingly calm and peaceful image. Maybe I have gone too far in reading his vision here, but I cannot help seeing his image in such a sexual way.

The title of the photograph, "Windowsill Daydreaming", also suggests that one can use their imagination and go really wild because daydreaming to me metaphors human sexual desires. Even White talked about his highest moment in his journal, "Memorable Fancies." "Art is a communication of ecstasy. And ecstasy is bedded in the personality, so that self-understanding and revelation of self is the raw material of art" (Bunnelle 27). It seems that there is no limit when one is daydreaming inside a house while looking at the outside world. The image could also be read as White expressing his feeling from inside out or the fear of the outside world from an outsider's point of view due to the clear boundaries of "right" the lightened part above and "wrong" as the darken shadow part below in the obscured outside world during the McCarthy era in the 50's. By titling the image "Windowsill daydreaming", White was able to give the image a poetic taste and expand the possibilities of meanings to an infinite number, which again suggests a peak moment. He also gave viewers permission to feel free and go beyond what White offered in the image.

I would also like to point out the stain on the right side curtain. I realized that this was a metaphor of White's guilt. Although Windowsill Daydreaming is a beautiful work of art, this stain or the dark mark on the curtain really distracted me while reading the image. This might not be intentional, but I read it as the shame of White's sexual orientation, alluding to the hidden side of the photographer. This stain is the "punctum" in this image! This is the Francis Bacon's whipping room moment. It could also be read as secret wounds in our hearts or the slippage. Can you hear the human cry from this image? Suddenly we are losing contact with the sublime while we are entering his mindscape. This strange mix of good and evil in the image must be the one that is evoking various moods and conflicts. The presence of pathos and eros is very clear. In comparison to his early poem in "Memorable Fancies", the following poem seems to be very appropriate to his image of slippage. White writes,

This unwinged gull

dismembered

living

disassembled

in my heart

not more wingless

than my voice

falling

crashing

heardless

in the feathers of the wind.

(Bunnelle 26)

By reading White's images, we feel that we are trespassing his private mind space. Since he was only open to the ones who could be sympathetic to his visions, this is probably what he wanted us to discover. His deliberately disclosed photographs seem to transmit some kind of subliminal signals to the ones who want to receive and understand his feelings. The photographs White took were very personal; therefore, they attracted more viewers. His visions also allowed more audiences to get involved in his personal life, which resulted in a cult following White. Don't we all love seeing someone's hidden side and frustrations? His success might also come from exposing his life in a very abstract way, which allowed viewers to see his images in a voyeuristic way. Dorothy Norman writes, "What may be the deepest meanings of the images shown are not always easily recognizable at first glance. They emerge with increasing clarity only as we experience them. They take on a living reality to the degree that we are able to penetrate the mask that hides us from ourselves." (Norman 7)

When we are trying to find out what they mean, or what else they might mean, we are also discovering ourselves. White often talked about photograph as a mirror, while suggesting the act of photographing as the mirror reflection of self. He writes, "When the photograph is a mirror of the man, and the man is a mirror of the world, then Spirit might take over" (Bunnelle 26), Strong powers of equivalence are apparent here. One might realize that he was not looking at White's vision anymore. What he could be looking at might be himself reflected on the mirror that White purposefully created. It really scares me, because I could have been looking at my own desires and hidden whipping room in my mind that I did not know about�c. White's mirror is also very different from the early Daguerrotype's mirror with memories because White's mirror reflects one's psychological side. His images are so open and naked that there are hundreds of thousands of interpretations, which reflect our inner pathos and eros. This is the private side of my face I did not want to show. Now we are the ones who have exposed our punctum to Minor White's photographs. Our public faces that everyone knows are gone. Our masks are not covering our faces anymore. Who is naked now? Minor White, or us? I believe that approaching White's visions are similar to lovemaking with the photographer. By reading his photographs deeper and deeper, we start taking our clothes off until our emotions are completely naked. At this moment, the relation of the photographer and the viewers are very close that the viewers are not just reading his image anymore. We are sharing our spirits at the peak moments of multiple ecstasies.

When one knows the concept of White's image making, understanding the rest of his photographs proves quite easy. All we have to do is to be ready for physical reactions from the cosmic equivalent shapes White captured. One would also find lots of erected figures in his other images; examples are Navarro River, California 1947, Evil Plants 1947, N. Union Street, Rochester, 1960, Water Street, Portland, 1940, and Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, 1949, which suggest his homoerotic desires and offer a subtext. We should not be afraid of taking risks to interpret White's visions, since what you see in his visions is what your vision is. After all White was not afraid of taking photographs of the driftwood sticks in the sand by a male nude model (William Smith, 1953) to release his desires during 1950's.

I admit that it has been quite difficult reading his images, and it has also taken a long time to understand his concept, since I am not a homosexual; however, I believe that one does not have to be a homosexual to be sympathetic with Minor White. As an outsider living in America studying photography, I too understood his deep loneliness of being different, since we outsiders tend to have a different point of view than an insider, and we tend to see what else they are rather than what they see themselves as. Lastly, I am curious how women, homosexual, bisexual, or ones from other cultures perceive his private images. I am especially curious about what Georgia O'Keeffe had to say about White's sexually charged photographs. This would be my new research on Minor White in the future.

Bibliography

Peter C. Bunnell. Minor White, The Eye That Shapes. New Jersey:
Princeton University, 1989

Michael E. Hoffman, Minor White, Rites & Passages. New York:
Aperture, 1978

Dorothy Norman, quoted in Minor White, A Living Remembrance. New York:
Aperture, 1984

Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography. New York:
Abbeville Press, 1997

Postscriot

Special Collections at California State University, Long Beach, owns a total of twelve original black and white prints by Minor White. According to the coordinator of the special collections, Fred Modern, who was a late physician in Long Beach and a friend of Minor White during the late 1970's, donated all the prints to the University. I was able to examine each print very closely. Facing the original prints so closely offered me a very different experience from looking at reproductions in the photography books. I was able to have physical reactions with very intimate and emotional moments as if I were communicating with the soul of Minor White. It is stunning how much "aura" original prints can offer.

YUJIRO OTSUKI
MAY 2001