ART REVIEW : White Collection’s Last Stand

“Parallels & Contrasts: Photographs From the Stephen White Collection,” at the Museum of Photographic Arts, is making its last American stand. After the exhibition closes on July 8, the 124 photographs in the traveling show will go to their new home at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, along with about 15,000 other items in the collection.

White sold his collection to the Japanese museum in February for an undisclosed sum. News of the sale, reportedly in the low millions, put a spotlight on a collection that had grown up quietly and gained little public recognition. White, who began collecting in the early ‘70s, has operated a gallery in Los Angeles since 1975, presenting dozens of important exhibitions of vintage photography, but the photographs he loves have been difficult to sell to his audience. More often than not, he squirreled away unmarketable treasures in his personal collection.

When officials of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum decided to set up a center to illuminate both the art and science of photography, they looked around for a ready-made collection and approached White. Seduced by the prospect of solvency after years of financial struggle, and assured that his collection would not only remain intact but be seen by thousands of museum visitors, he agreed to the proposal. One condition was that “Parallels & Contrasts”--which originated at the New Orleans Museum of Art--would complete its itinerary with San Diego as the last stop. The show also traveled to Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Honolulu and Akron, Ohio.

White’s entire collection covers an unfathomable breadth of material, predominantly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The sampling in the exhibition might have been unfathomable, too, had White and curator Nancy Barrett not organized it along thematic lines: landscape and architecture, science and industry, portraiture, nudes. White’s curiosity about photography is almost without limit, but it is not without a certain logic.

For one thing, he is interested in images, not names, and he cheerfully shows anonymous works alongside those of such celebrated masters as Edward Weston, Eadweard Muybridge and Alfred Stieglitz. For another, White is fascinated with the relationship between photographers and their subjects, which means that he is more likely to choose informal, telling portraits than traditionally posed pictures and that he leans toward work with social or historical ramifications.

Those preferences produce “parallels,” but they also allow for “contrasts,” as the exhibition title indicates. Among landscapes, Carleton E. Watkins’ photograph of a massive tree, elaborately dressed in a voluminous mantel of leaves, contrasts sharply with Count Olympe Aguado’s pictures of naked trunks and branches. Watkins’ image is a textured mass; Aguado’s photographs are all lines and angles.

Photographs of science and industry are no less varied, ranging from an X-ray of a child with a pin in its mouth to shots of shipyards, military troops and agricultural workers. These photographs betray an awe-struck attitude about industrialization, but machine worship is portrayed in pictures of gleaming trains, as well as in romantic visions of workers who toil among monumental smokestacks.

Portraits portray famous and unknown individuals, royal and common family groups, and they encompass a full range of emotion in the shy faces of farm children, a scowling sailor and such romantic figures as Weston’s “Ricardo Gomez Robelo,” Lotte Jacobi’s “Arhmed” and Julia Margaret Cameron’s “Mrs. Duckworth as Virgin Mary.” One startling picture, taken by Camillus S. Fly in 1886, depicts a “Captive White Boy” among Indians in Tombstone, Ariz.

The nudes generally appear to come from an age when modesty prevailed but wasn’t confused with Puritanical inhibition. While Bill Brandt’s female nude with cut-off arms poses strange questions about the difference between real life people and sculpture, most of the nudes are suffused with near-reverence for the human body. Whether a subject is likened to a masthead (in the work of Laure Albin-Guillot), a tuberous vegetable (Weston) or theatrical characters, the figure is treated as a vulnerable temple of beauty.

After wandering through the four sections of the exhibition, a comforting feeling about vintage photography emerges. No matter how many old pictures we have seen, there are still wonderful discoveries to be made among images printed on little sheets of photosensitive paper. Notre Dame comes alive, for example, in Charles Marville’s surprising view of the cathedral’s spires and gargoyles, circa 1859. No longer a mere tourist attraction, the building is an amazing creation that bristles with artistic detail, wit and Christian dogma.

Museum visitors from Southern California have reason to regret the loss of this collection, but White has not dropped out of photography. He is hard at work on photography books and exhibitions. And he is still collecting, a habit that he admits is an incurable addiction.

Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, to July 8. Open daily.