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

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

returned to her ancestral home in Glasgow, Scotland, and remained there the rest of her life in a "state of curdled despair," unwilling to ignore the obligation to care for ailing female relatives yet eager to return to New York, whose artistic community she recalled as having "a strange gleam of vision, something worth striving after."

The book also discusses another successful White-trained advertising photographer, Richards, who rigorously applied geometric design principles to her work. It also illustrates a photograph by Stella Simon, a devoted White student whose apparent influence on photographic history has not been given its due in the White literature. Julien Levy - who was to become an influential dealer in photography and surrealist art - credits her as being his "earliest introduction to the world of photographers."(11) Levy accompanied his Harvard friend Louis Simon and his mother, Stella, on the Mexican study trip on which White died. Later, Mrs. Simon generously lent photographs by White and others to Levy's first photography exhibition in 1931 and put him in touch with West Coast photographers.

While the White school was teaching photography as a formal art for public consumption through printed media, Stieglitz's own photography was becoming increasingly emotional, hermetic and exclusive. Modern art had become his new hobby horse, but when he did hold forth on photography it was to promote an idealistic, expressive use of the camera. In a sense, the two photographers had crossed paths and changed places. Stieglitz had begun as a photographic educator, proselytizing through his writings in American Amateur Photographer, Camera Notes, Camera Work and elsewhere. While White was creating his own Eden in Ohio, Stieglitz's photographs, taken in Europe and New York, were worldly.

Late in life, during summers at Lake George, Stieglitz found a personal vision in the world at his door. Different though the two men's pictures look, the ingredients for each consisted of pastoral settings inhabited mostly by a few lovely women. Perhaps Stieglitz's discovery that photographic happiness could, like a bluebird, lie in his own backyard made him retrospectively regret White's move to New York all the more.(12)

It is curious that a man who talked incessantly about himself and his philosophy of life, who easily revealed his emotional state to anyone who would listen, should have been so reluctant to let his photographs be seen. But, as an extension of the mistrust he showed Struss, Stieglitz did not believe that the public at large would appreciate his work. Experience also taught him that photographs were often damaged when lent to exhibitions. He knew that few printers would reproduce his work faithfully.

Thus, when Georgia O'Keeffe gave Stieglitz photographs to public institutions in 1929, she bound them to strict custody: Stieglitz's pictures could not be lent to exhibitions at other institutions, and her permission was required for most reproductions. (The recent Lake George exhibition and catalog could come about only after O'Keeffe had agreed in 1983 to release the National Gallery of Art from restrictions on its definitive Stieglitz collection.) O'Keeffe had no way of knowing that respect for photography would grow, or that her stringent limitations on Stieglitz's original photographs would make his words more familiar than his pictures. As John Szarkowski put it in the exhibition catalog, Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George, "Stieglitz is famous, but his work is little known."