CLARENCE H. WHITE, Greek Dancers, Barnard College, c. 1911, 9.125x6.875" Platinum print, Printed c. 1911, Signed in pencil on mount recto. Inventory number inscribed in pencil on mount verso.

Part of a gift portfolio from Clarence White to his student Antoinette Hervey. Clarence White was one of the leading teachers and pictorialists of the first three decades of the 20th century. Pictorial views were fashion statements, particularly in the 1900s and early 1910s.

Clarence White (1871-1925) played a leading role in pictorial photography both during and after the heyday of the Photo-Secession. His work was highly visible in Secession exhibitions and publications. White also became widely known as a photographic educator, teaching at established institutions and his own school. His pictorial photographs always featured soft-focus effects and a quiet, personal mood.

Clarence Hudson White was born in West Carlisle, Ohio, on April 8, 1871. Four years later, his family moved to nearby Newark, where he grew up. After finishing high school, White became a bookkeeper at a local wholesale grocery and worked there until 1904.

White made his first photographs in 1893, and by four years later was receiving awards for his artistry. Eighteen ninety-eight was an important year for him; his work was accepted at the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon, he organized the Newark Camera Club, and he traveled east to meet Alfred Stieglitz in New York. In 1899, he was the subject of one-person exhibitions at both the Camera Club of New York and the Boston Camera Club. Over the next few years, his star continued to rise. Stieglitz included four photogravures by him in Camera Notes, White juried salons in Chicago and Philadelphia, and he was admitted to London's prestigious Linked Ring Brotherhood. F. Holland Day included his work in the New School of American Photography show, which was hung at the Royal Photographic Society, London, in 1900, and at the Photo-Club de Paris, the following year.

Stieglitz designated White as one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession in 1902, when the group's premiere show was presented at New York's National Arts Club. Subsequently, White's pictures were seen in all the major Secession exhibitions, including the 1910 show at Buffalo's Albright Art Gallery, where he was the best represented American. His work was also presented in Camera Work, which featured twenty-five of his richly printed photogravures between 1903 and 1910.

White produced largely figure studies of family members, sensitively posed both indoors and out, with simple props like books, mirrors, and glass balls. The homespun subjects and subtle tones of his platinum prints reflected the photographer's gentle, Midwestern nature. Beginning in 1897, they were extensively exhibited in this country and Europe, seen in shows in Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Dresden, Glasgow, Hamburg, Leeds, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Rochester, San Francisco, Syracuse, Toronto, Turin, and Vienna.

White attempted to make his living as a photographer after quitting his bookkeeping job in 1904. Still based in Ohio, he became a traveling portrait photographer, primarily in the Midwest. However, after only a few years of mixed success, he moved to New York in 1906, where he took up teaching. In 1907, Columbia University's Teachers College hired him on as a lecturer, where he became acquainted with the artist Arthur Wesley Dow. White also taught at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and in 1910 established his own summer school of photography on an island in Maine. Four years later, he opened the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York, which, over many years, resided at various Manhattan locations. White promoted the integration of professional methods and pictorial aesthetics, inspiring such students as Paul Outerbridge, Jr., Ralph Steiner, and Margaret Watkins to produce creative commercial work.

White provided illustrations for some popular magazines, such as McClure's and Everybody's, as well as frontispieces for a few books. His most significant illustration job, however, was the 1904 poetry book Songs of All Seasons by Ira Billman, White's uncle. Billman chose over forty images by his nephew, primarily landscapes and figure studies, and dedicated the publication to him.

After the disintegration of the Photo-Secession around 1910, White carried on the banner of pictorialism for the next decade and a half. He severed his relationship with Stieglitz and, in 1913, helped Edward R. Dickson commence the periodical Platinum Print. Three years later, he organized a new group, the Pictorial Photographers of America (PPA), for which he served as its first president. The PPA promoted inclusiveness and education, circulating popular exhibitions and publishing five volumes of its annual, Pictorial Photography in America, during the 1920s. In 1920, White also helped found the Art Center, a group of New York-based arts organizations that worked toward uniting art and industry.

In 1919, White presented a solo show of his work at the Erich Art Galleries in New York. Six years later, he was on a photographic trip in Mexico with some of his students when he suffered an aneurism of the aorta; he died in a Mexico City hospital on July 7, 1925. Friends and family members kept the Clarence H. White School of Photography running until 1943.

Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012) https://www.christianapeterson.com/ This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.