Broken Paint Figure

Minor White was a significant figure in 20th-century photography not only as an artist, but also as an editor (he co-founded Aperture magazine), curator (at George Eastman House), and teacher (at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He was greatly influenced by Alfred Stieglitz’s concept of “Equivalents”—in which a photograph not only depicts a subject but also serves as a metaphor for emotions and the photographer’s inner state—as well as Zen philosophy. Interested in “things for what else they are,” White found compelling pictures in the abstract or banal.