Impure Vision by Moa Goysdotter

Author:Moa Goysdotter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789187351020
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2014-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Focusing on the metaphor— the equivalents of Minor White

Minor White’s photography during the Fifties and Sixties challenged the straight photographic paradigm in one aspect: he plumbed emotion and the inner life more deeply than traditional straight photography might had recommended. Wolfgang Kemp has summarized American post-war art photography in four terms: inwardness, abstraction, nature-themed, and private symbolism.17 Though it could be argued that photographers like White partly freed photography from literal interpretations and social contexts by methodologically pushing the medium in a transcendental and metaphysical direction, it was never freed from its specific stance on objective vision. Though White’s work led photography into more introspective avenues philosophically speaking, and gave it an abstract turn in terms of motif, he never wavered from straight photography’s technical approach which held him fast in a traditional approach to the relation between image and reality.18 The relation between mind and photography that developed with White during the 1960s in American art photography still carried all the hallmarks of Ansel Adams’s ideas on straight photography as able to reveal a correspondence between the objects of the world and the human soul. The successful communication of emotion, according to Adams, was dependent on the photographer’s optical photographic perfection. In ‘A personal credo’ written 1943, Adams had explained that ‘A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. And the expression of what one feels should be set forth in terms of simple devotion to the medium—a statement of the utmost clarity and perfection possible under the conditions of creation and production.’19 In the same year, White wrote an instructive text on how to photograph feelings through objects.20 The photography that dominated the American photographic art scene in the Sixties adhered in all essentials to the same principles of optical technological vision as straight photography had done, though now with a greater emphasis on abstraction and symbolism using photographic metaphors.

Inspired by Alfred Stieglitz’s 1925–34 series of photographs of clouds he had titled Equivalents, a major proportion of Minor White’s post-war production was concentrated on ‘equivalents’, or metaphors, where mundane details found in the surrounding world—pieces of bark, broken glass, frost crystals, melting snow, stones: most often taken from Nature—were captured in close-up, suggesting an abstract pattern that, according to White’s teaching, would be able to instil in the viewer a state of mind or a feeling. For White, the photograph is thus a function instead of a thing:

When the photographer shows us what he considers to be an Equivalent, he is showing us an expression of a feeling, but this feeling is not the feeling he had for the object that he photographed. What really happened is that he recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state or place within himself.

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