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

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 1996 by Barbara L. Michaels

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

To me, the incident dramatizes the moment when White's and Stieglitz's photographic paths were about to diverge. Struss had a foot in each camp. As one 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 under the aegis of White - some photographers turned their artistic talents from idealistic to unabashedly commercial ends. At the same time, modern artists, rather than photographers, were engrossing Stieglitz, whose own work became increasingly personal and introspective.

"Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography," is one of a recent rash of exhibitions and eponymously named catalogs to put 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 White, his students and teachers at the White School. 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 represented in the exhibition.

Ten prints by 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 role in translating the precepts of Cubism into a usable language for advertising products" but faded from sight after abandoning her photographic career in 1928 to care for her aunts in Scotland.(3) Watkins's ability to turn ordinary household objects into abstract designs like Domestic Symphony (1921) in the Coville collection set an example for her students, especially Outerbridge. In the early 1920s, Watkins's success as a woman in the man's world of advertising made her a role model for Bourke-White. It has recently been discovered that, some five years after studying with Watkins at the White school, Bourke-white wrote to her, recalling the usefulness of her critiques.(4)

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

In her catalog essay on 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 under a tree, to entirely abandoning representation in a still life. Many of the Coville pictures show how students responded to those problems. If some results turned out to be formulaic exercises - agile, graceful calisthenics, rather than innovative choreography - they are nonetheless valuable for showing the school's methods, and sometimes the school itself (e.g., in Pictorialism into Modernism pp. 60, 138, 141, 147, 149, 153 and An American Century of Photography figure 24). In the pictorialist tradition, student photographers were more concerned to show how light infused their classrooms than to record the details of Hitchcock chairs, drafting tables, photographic equipment, displays of student photographs or smock-clad students. Nonetheless, these soft-focused pictures capture the modest, calm, welcoming ambiance of the school where, as Dorothea Lange recalled, White "gave everyone some feeling of encouragement in some peculiar way."(6)

The Covilles have performed a service to photographic history by bringing Clarence White's importance as an educator, tastemaker and photographer to a large audience. The catalog represents a step in the ongoing expansion of photographic history from technical and aesthetic perspectives to today's more social view of the medium. Bonnie Yochelson's essay, "Clarence H. White, Peaceful Warrior" continues the path-breaking reassessment of White that she began some years ago in "Clarence H. White Reconsidered: An Alternative to the Modernist Aesthetic of Straight Photography"(7) She discusses White's involvement in publishing the journal Platinum Print and in forming the group Pictorial Photographers of America during the teens.