Clarence H White, The Arbor 1908

Clarence H White

The Arbor, 1908

Camera Work XXIII

Photogravure, 20.6 x 15.3 cm

Clarence Hudson White was born in 1871. For sixteen years, from 1890 to 1906, he was the head bookkeeper in a wholesale grocery firm at Newark, Ohio. In 1894 he began experimental work in photography and two years later was rec­ognized by the Ohio Photographer's Association as being "a man ten years ahead of his time." In 1898 his work was exhibited at the Philadelphia Salon and came to the attention of Stieglitz. A year later he was elected as a honor­ary member in the Camera Club of New York and exhibited in London, New York, and Boston. In 190 l he illustrated Irving Bacheller's Eben Holden using Newark, Ohio, people as models. Thus began a series of illustration work which included Clara Morris's Beneath the Wrin­kle (1904) and Newport the Maligned (1908). In 1906, after becoming a founding member of the Photo-Secession, he moved to New York and began an exten­sive teaching career that ultimately took much of his creative energy, and greatly decreased his own photographic work. He lectured at Columbia from 1907 until his death, and in 1910 he established with Max Weber his own summer school of photography in Seguinland, Maine. He was also an instructor at the Brooklyn In­stitute of Arts and Sciences from 1908-1921. ln 1910 he and Weber helped Stieg­litz and Haviland hang the successful Albright Exhibition in Buffalo. Partly as a result of some differences over this exhi­bition-the procedure for the returning of prints, and their disagreement about photographic esthetics-White and Stieg­litz broke their relationship several years later. White died in Mexico City in 1925 while on tour with students from his school.