Pattern vs. passion: the legacy of the Clarence H. White School of Photography

Put yourself in the shoe of the 23-year-old photographer, Karl Struss, as he was showing his dusky multiple platinum prints to that great arbiter of photographic taste, Alfred Stieglitz, in 1909 Imagine your astonishment as Stieglitz wets his finger and touches your print of an Alpine show Only after he is fully convinced that ink does not ble from the darkest part of your print does he shake his head, admitting that he has not at any time seen such blacks in a photograph.(1)

As the star pupil of Clarence H White, Stieglitz's companion photographer and advocate of artistic photography in the exclusive Photo-Secession, Struss might have awaited a warmer reception. But Struss (who was always more interested in technical accomplishments than personal relations) over-look Stieglitz's implicit mistrust of himself and his teacher. level years after he became the last of the Photo-Secessionists, a magazine photographer and a cinematographer, Struss rever Stieglitz.(2)

To me the incident dramatizes the instant when White's and Stieglitz's photographic paths were about to diverge. Struss had a lower extremity in each camp. As single of the very last photographers whom Stieglitz featured in Camera Work, then as a photographer for Vanity Fair, and later as a still and moving picture photographer in Hollywood Struss epitomizes the era from about 1910 to 1940 when - especially beneath the aegis of White - a certain number of photographers turned their artistic talents from idealistic to unabashedly commercial extremitys At the same time, late artists, rather than photographers, were engrossing Stieglitz, whose have work became increasingly personal and introspective.

"Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H White academy of Photography," is one of a new rash of exhibitions and eponymously named catalogs to place this period in the limelight. The exhibition features the collection of Warren and Margot Coville, Michigan collectors who have dedicated themselves to gathering photographs by dint of White, his students and teachers at the White gymnasium Many now-famous photographers trained with White, including Margaret Bourke-White, Anton Breuhl Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge Jr Ralph Steiner, Struss and Doris Ulmann, all of whom are exhibited in the exhibition.

Ten prints by the agency of Margaret Watkins, who studied and later taught with White, comprise the show's greatest rediscovery. As Naomi Rosenblum has noted, Watkins "played a largely unacknowledged character in translating the precepts of Cubism into a usable language for advertising products" on the other hand faded from sight after abandoning her photographic career in 1928 to care for her aunts in Scotland.(3) Watkins's ability to revolve ordinary household objects into abstract designs like Domestic consonance (1921) in the Coville collection put an example for her scholars especially Outerbridge. In the early 1920 Watkins's succes as a woman in the man's world of advertising made her a part model for Bourke-White. It has freshly been discovered that, some five years after studying with Watkins at the White institute Bourke-white wrote to her, recalling the usefulness of her critiques.(4)

The Coville collection shows nearly half a century of photography. The catalog and exhibition trace White's activities as a teacher and photographer from the 1890 when he gave informal instruction to members of the Newark, Ohio Camera bludgeon through his first years in fresh York (c. 1907-1909) when he taught at Teachers guild to the establishment of his hold school, with winter classes in fresh York and summer settings in Maine, and later in Connecticut. After White's death during a close attention trip to Mexico in 1925 his wife, Jane Felix White, and son Clarence Jr carried upon until wartime economic conditions forced the place of education to close in 1942.

In her catalog essay upon White's teachings, Kathleen A. Erwin, curator of the Coville Collection, explains that Clarence White and his instructors emphasized design rather than photographic technique or personal expression.(5) Assignments ranged from photographing an interior against a window, to creating an angular still life, to depicting a figure below a tree, to entirely abandoning representation in a still life. Many of the Coville pictures present to view how students responded to those puzzles If some results turned without to be formulaic exercises - agile, graceful calisthenics, rather than innovative choreography - they are nonetheless valuable for showing the school's modes and sometimes the school itself (eg in Pictorialism into Modernism pp 60 138 141 147 149 153 and An American hundred of Photography figure 24). In the pictorialist tradition, scholar photographers were more concerned to exhibit how light infused their classrooms than to record the details of Hitchcock chairs, drafting tables, photographic equipment, displays of pupil photographs or smock-clad students. Nonetheless, these soft-focused pictures capture the unostentatious calm, welcoming ambiance of the institute where, as Dorothea Lange recalled, White "gave everyone a certain number of feeling of encouragement in a certain number of peculiar way."(6)