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Adams
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MINOR WHITE believed that photography was a way to know, and might even have agreed with Henry Miller, who said that art would die away when we all had learned enough. White's fundamental conviction waas that good photographs have to match up accurately with life is incontrovertible. We need only cite as evidence the fact that nobody can talk someone else into liking a picture. That just happens, suddenly one morning or slowly over a season, when a picture or the recollection of it aligns with the person's experience.
That in any case is how I came to value certain of White's landscapes. I lived on the Oregon coast next to a spectacular, often fog-shrouded headland; on clear days I could see from its summit across the fields of salal, down hundreds of feet of rock, and finally out over the ocean. It was like parts of the Bay Area coast and I began to understand, far from museums and art magazines, just how reverently White had paid attention to what he saw in California.
It was White's gift to understand passionately the limits of documentary photography narrowly defined. "The objectivitiy of the camera, used wrongly," he observed, "is the very devil." He knew that great pictures cannot be just about particular landscapes; they have to direct use to more, even eventually to the whole of life. If they do not, then "the documentary photograph, the literal image, is the ultimate illusion."
White's choice of the ovean as a subject was for him exactly right. Its appearance, closely observed, is hypnotic; who can be uninterested in so delicate a light, or the power of waves on rock, or the immensity of the whole view? White's pictures come to more, however, than just these geographic facts, as anyone who has walked the beach almost knows they must. The ocean, by virtue of its size and apparent emptiness, invites attention outward from our pretty landscapes, away from ourselves (WHite said once that he "appaled by the image of his inner landscape"). The sea is too vast to understand and too awesome to avoid; it attracts us as it offers a final liberation from human scale. All this coincided richly with White's understanding of art as metaphor, as a suggestion of similarities between the known and the barely known.
If it was White's achievement to show us that photographs can point beyond themselves, it was his fate as a human being, limited like the rest of us, sometimes to fail. But, because his goals were major, the failures are not entirely failures; they have values as they are instructive. White, who was a fully committed teacher, would surely have told us to use whichever of his pictures might help.
One can begin by noting that White himself sensed a potential problem in what he wanted to do. He observed hopefully, referring to some of his own work, that "thespring-tight line between reality and photograph has been stretched relentlessly, but it has not been broken. These abstractions of nature have not left the world of appearances; for to do so is to break the camera's strongest point ~ its authenticity." At his best, White made pictures that were strong because of that authenticity, the appearance of the world. When he failed, it was because he tried to escape it, to travel to what e. e. cummings sardonically called a "hell of a good universe next door." Because we all have wanted to make that trip, in sheet weariness with home, we can sympathize, but, because there is no hope of reaching such a destination short of death, we are obliged to resist it.
The problem of an art in flight from the world of appearances was not uniquely White's. I would trade al lof Stieglitz's pictures of blurry night clouds for one of his sharply focused views of the sky in daylight, one of those in which he customarily nicked in some solidifying foliage from the ground where we walk. The same issue, in slightly different form, has always plauged fiction; writers struggle against the temptation to write allegory, airy stuff where characters walk stiffly around wearing signs, instead of slouching ambiguously past our neighbors, and only afterword coming to represent more than just themselves. It is the strength of art over allegory that it is more like life; in art as in life, abstractions and truths of the spirit reach us only as they are embodied in believable specifics, in recognizable particulars, what William Carlos Williams identified succintly as "things".
For things to be credible in photographs requires, I think, that there be an indication of the subject's actual size. White, however, turned away from literal geography when he made landscapes that omit an indication of scale. The pictures range from what I presume might be medium shots to close-ups, but the practice in all of them is so thoroughly to deny the viewer clues to the size that the difference does not matter. We cannot grasp with certainty whether the literal geography is composed of sand or gravel, whether a view is an aerial or an examination of disintegrating plaster (PLate XVIII).
XVIII Minor White, Wall, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1966
XIX Minor White, Pacific, Devil's Slide, 1947
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050414
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