A Picture of Photography’s Emergence as Art

Those who can, do, the derisive chestnut insists; and those who can’t, teach.

Clarence H. White was one who could--and did. But he’s also one who taught. In fact, for the first half of the 20th century there was probably no more influential an American teacher of photography than White.

His numerous students ranged from the incomparable--Margaret Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, Paul Outerbridge Jr., etc.--to less familiar journeymen (and, notably, women, who numbered fully half his students). Together they established a photographic status quo that was in place for decades.

Now, the pervasiveness of White’s pedagogical influence is the subject of a thorough and well-assembled exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego’s Balboa Park. If adjectives like “thorough” and “well-assembled” belie a certain lack of enthusiasm, it’s not because of any curatorial failure in this handsome presentation.

On the contrary: “Pictorialism Into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography,” organized by the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., in collaboration with the Detroit Institute of Arts and nearing the conclusion of a two-year national tour, carefully crosses every T and dots every I. Its excellent, readable catalog features an enlightening essay by historian Bonnie Yochelson, as well as a revealing examination of White’s evolving curriculum by Kathleen A. Erwin, curator of the Warren and Margot Coville Photographic Collection, from which the show’s 111 images were drawn.

The pleasant, evenhanded nature of the show derives instead from the feeling of thoroughness and conscientiousness in most of the photographs themselves. Rarely does your head snap around in surprised delight at one of these pictures; rather, tasteful appreciation is the more common response.

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In 1902 White (1871--1925) had been a founding member of the famous Photo-Secession group headquartered in New York, along with the domineering Alfred Steiglitz and 11 other photographers. Dedicated to Pictorialist photography and its independence from the academic establishment, the Photo-Secession was determined that photography be conceived of as an art. A photograph’s expressiveness was regarded as distinct, both from the scientific and documentary uses of the camera and from hobbycraft.

A central anomaly in White’s photographic career concerns the degree to which his widely admired gifts as a teacher eventually made his own work a cornerstone of a new academic establishment. He was 43 in 1914, when he opened the Clarence H. White School of Photography in Manhattan, the first (and for a long time the only) pedagogical institution of its kind in the nation. The White School continued to operate in a variety of locations until 1942--long after its founder’s death from a heart attack while on a photographic study tour in Mexico City. That the school could continue for nearly 20 years without its principal mentor is one indication of its curricular stability.

The show is divided into seven concise sections. It begins with White’s 1907 association with Columbia University and includes closely related teaching programs he established in Maine and Connecticut. A final section gives examples of late work by photographers who had been White students.

The main focus, though, is on the Manhattan school and the phases of its development. In keeping with much early Pictorialist photography, many of these pictures consciously echo themes, strategies and interests associated with late 19th century European painting.

White’s softly blurred “Study of a Dancer” (1910) recalls a Degas pastel. Amy Whittemore’s pastoral “Poplars at Night” (circa 1910) turns to a landscape subject favored by Pissarro and Monet. Florence Livingston’s “Maid Reading a Letter” (circa 1913-1917) is one of several images by a variety of photographers that derive from a familiar type of French and Dutch genre scene.

Sometimes the photographs go a bit further afield in their sources, or else they’re more subtly progressive. Edward R. Dickson’s “Design in Nature” (circa 1913) shows an aerial view of a pond, with tree branches silhouetted against the water in a manner reflective of the taste for Japanese prints. Cubist abstraction is suggested by the angular planes of snow-covered architectural details in a Greenwich Village street in Arthur D. Chapman’s “Diagonals” (1913).

Most of the photographs suggest a medium that, in the first decades of this century, was no longer new but was still resistant to traditional cultural categories. In the show, photography is being set on the road to proud professionalization. Rather than art as high adventure, this is camera work committed to artistic respectability.

Interestingly, many of these pictures reflect the way the school’s curriculum was oriented toward problem-solving.

Take Livingston’s pensive image of a letter-reading maid. The softly illuminated composition, along with the proliferation of similarly themed photographs of single figures by a window, was born of a typical classroom assignment in White’s school: Students were required to photograph a figure in an interior lit by a window, sometimes with portions of the view out the window visible.

Problem-solving like that required students to grapple with issues both aesthetic and technical. Solving problems, though, isn’t the sort of approach that sets the stage for the radical, free-wheeling inventiveness of, say, an avant-garde artist like Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko. Instead, it’s an attitude toward camera work redolent of good old American pragmatism.

And the term camera work--which Steiglitz also used as the name for the magazine he so famously edited--is worth considering. Politically, the Ohio-born White was a socialist in the American grain, which means he was less interested in a Marxian dialectic of class conflict than in securing the dignity of labor.

Intentionally or not, a photography curriculum geared toward problem-solving prepared a way of working within the demands of a capitalist society on the brink of a communications explosion in the 1920s. Whether the emergent communications genre was photojournalism or advertising, photographers like Bourke-White and Outerbridge faced newly evolving problems with an inventiveness and technical proficiency that owe much to the training initially developed by White and his school.

“Pictorialism Into Modernism” may not be loaded with individual images of great drama. Still, it does record a quietly decisive revolution.

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* “Pictorialism Into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography,” Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, (619) 238-7559; through Feb. 8. Open daily.