White, Clarence Hudson

My father was engaged in wholesale groceries, Clarence began as an accountant in the same company. His wife, Jane Felix (they married in 1893) became his muse, critic, manager. The overwhelming majority of the photographs were taken by White between 1893 and 1906, when he worked full-time in a grocery company and could use only evening hours and weekends for photography. Accordingly, Clarence could shoot mainly relatives and friends. In 1898 he created a club of amateur enthusiasts.

He received the Ohio Photographers Association Medal (1896), and participated in the 1898 Philadelphia Photo Salon. In the same year he met Alfred Stiglitz , and with him became one of the founders of the Photo-Secession movement. In 1906 he left the grocery service, moved to New York and took up photography completely. White's work appeared at Photo-Secession exhibitions, published in the Stiglitz quarterly Camera Work . His work was devoted to an entire issue of the magazine.

Since 1907 he taught photography at Columbia University . In 1914 founded the School of Modern Photography. He was an outstanding teacher, among his students - Margaret Bourke-White , Dorothea Lange , Doris Ullmann , Paul Outerbridge and many other outstanding masters of American photography.

Since 1910, Stiglitz began to move away from pictorialism towards direct photography . White did not support this direction of his evolution and remained the largest representative of pictorialism. In 1916, he became one of the founders of the Society of American Pictorialist Photographers and until 1921 was its president. The society organized its own exhibitions, published a magazine, but saw its main tasks in the field of art education.

• Bunnell P. Clarence H. White: the reverence for beauty. Athens: Ohio university gallery of fine art, 1986

• Clarence White at artnet
• Clarence White on PhotoIsland (rus.)