Clarence H White, The Orchard 1905
Clarence H White, The Orchard 1905
Clarence H White
The Orchard, 1905
Camera Work IX
Photogravure, 20.5 x 15.7 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.
Reproduced
Davis, Keith F. An American Century of Photography: From Dry Plate to Digital. Kansas City, Mo: Hallmark Cards, 1999. Print. p. 93
Doty, Robert M. Photo-secession: Photography As a Fine Art. N.Y: Eastman, 1960. plate XIII.
Erwin, Kathleen A. Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography : Photographs from the Coville Photographic Art Foundation and Warren and Margot Coville Photographic Collection : an Annotated Checklist. Detroit?: The Foundation, 1997. p.13
Gernsheim, Helmut. Creative Photography. Aesthetic Trends 1839-1960. [with Illustrations.]. London: Faber & Faber, 1962. p. 147
Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press, 2008. no. 395
Weaver, Mike. The Photographic Art. Edinburgh, 1986. no. 56
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