Clarence Hudson White, 1871-1925

By Zachary Vincent

The Kiss, 1904, platinum print laminated on Japanese paper

From small town Ohio to the roaring New York City of the early twentieth century, Clarence Hudson White was part of the most critical years in the history of American photography. Through his work and the work of his contemporaries in the Photo-Secession movement, photography came to be seen not just as a way of recording the surrounding world, but a means of making commentary on that world and getting at bigger universal truths in the way only art can. With his unique style of sensuality, attention to detail, and philosophical allusions, Clarence Hudson White can be described as the heart of the Photo-Secession movement as much as the famed Alfred Stieglitz was its mind.

White was born in the small town of New Carlisle, Ohio on 8th April 1871. The extent to which White’s childhood and young adult life in the rural Midwestern United States influenced his art is a subject of debate amongst historians of White’s work. While it did not prevent him from corresponding with photographers working as far away as New York City and Europe, the kind of life he led certainly impacted the way he approached his artistic practice. White worked as a bookkeeper during the day but would dream of photography at night. It is said that he would plan his shoots for days, limited as he was in funds for ample film, and would spend hours staging his subjects to get the perfect shot. His incorporation of the natural world in his photography before his move to New York in 1906 is just partial evidence of the importance of rural life to his photographic practice. The beautiful, clean dawn light illuminating his photos of this era is a further testament to his years of amateur practice, in which he would have to make his art before the workday – and it would influence his style even after early-morning work was no longer necessary. In a way, he always carried a piece of his Ohio photographic roots with him wherever he went.

Evening - Mother and Boys, 1905, platinum print

White’s thematic material is a window into his personal life and beliefs. The centrality of his loved ones in his oeuvre, especially his wife Jane and his children, is telling of his priorities as a family man (and of his family’s endless patience with his conscientiousness). It also allows his art to interrogate themes of privacy, domesticity, and gender. White’s treatment of women in his photographs ranges from sensual and objectifying to mystical to simple and domestic. He was undoubtedly fascinated by the relationship between the feminine and symbology, a feature of many other Pictorialist photographers of the era. Setting him apart from his contemporaries, though, is his diversity of approaches to the subject of women. In The Kiss of 1904, there is an ambiguity of subject which could appear either as sensual or matriarchal, depending on one’s perspective – and which makes the viewer hyperaware of their own position as an onlooker, something potentially unsettling. This is very different from Evening – Mother and Boys of 1905, in which the powerful holiness of motherhood is conveyed through dramatic scenery and timelessly innocent child nudity. In White’s work, the feminine is at once natural and supernatural, unknowable and intimate. It provides a fascinating view into the mind of a male photographer in a patriarchal society bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States.

Further themes explored by White include arguably Socialist ones: the importance of individual labour and collective craft and the freedom of a society in communion with itself. Critics have seen themes from Walt Whitman as well as Henry Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in White’s photography. Such is the diversity of the artist’s practice that he also dabbled in commercial photography and photographic illustration for books, activities perceived as transgressions against the lofty goals of the Photo-Secession movement in the mind of its founder Alfred Stieglitz. His falling out with White was undoubtedly linked to White’s willingness to explore the many applications of photography for the modern world, not only those purely for perception as ‘high art’. Despite their differences of opinion, both artists helped to shape the early years of the Photo-Secession movement with their Camera Work journal and their collaborative exhibitions and educational efforts.

From White’s breakthrough into the global photography scene with his success at the 1898 exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts through his many domestic and international exhibitions to his legacy as an educator with the schools he established in New York, Connecticut, and Maine, the artist was committed to taking beautiful pictures. Perhaps more importantly, he was devoted to taking meaningful ones, which has ensured his own enduring value to the photographic community long after his death in 1925.

Bibliography

“Clarence H. White”. Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed 4 April 2024. https://www.artic.edu/artists/37282/clarence-h-white.

McCauley, Anne. Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Oden, Lori. “Clarence H. White”. International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. Accessed 4 April 2024. https://iphf.org/inductees/clarence-h-white/.

“The Kiss”. Musee d’Orsay. Accessed 4 April 2024. https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/kiss-7359.