"Equivalence" / Minor White / about images

jtk · December 8, 2009

Images exist in our heads, not in prints or books, not on monitors. My prints hang on walls but their images exist elsewhere.

A photographer has a response to the world and attempts to acquire that response, a stimulating image, technically. Related images are formed in the heads of observers, to each his/her own.

A print is primarily a vehicle for an image, though it can also be an object. I like the physical substance of prints and I like the fact that they don't require electricity. I'm proud of my print skillsets but I've got a long way to go. It's good, to my way of thinking, to pursue rabbits I'll never catch. Prints are not images.

Others find print making a waste of time, much like physical fitness, reading intensively, acquiring another language, or playing a musical instrument :-)

Linked below are Minor White's fundamental thoughts about images, framed with the idea of "equivalence." I'm on a Minor White bender currently, have never really read him carefully, previously, despite years of influence, decades ago, by his students. White mentions some interesting photographers' names in this seminal 1963 essay.

White's concept of "Equivalence" was developed from Alfred Stieglitz's original idea. He coined the term, but Minor White developed it more fully. Edward Weston was fully aware of it in his own way, IMO.

I've seen a lot of White's photography and, although it's fine, I think his greatest accomplishment was in teaching. I've known a dozen of his students and was especially influenced by one of them, Conrad Forbes. Conrad brought a unique seriousness to my understanding of photography.

It's obvious that many of us use the idea of Equivalence, consciously or not, but few use the word. I've rarely done so because I've never previously thought it through. I think I can see it in some of my work, but I'm not sure how it applies. I don't know other similarly strong ideas that might apply, so this one's of interest.

I'm sure the idea has been addressed elsewhere on Photo.net, but I've not found it.

An "equivalent" is different from an illustration "of "something, and to the extent that it "tells a story" it does so non-didactically: Perhaps it's like Charlie Parker's music or oxygen...some of us (including me) accept it and rely on it and don't even notice it most of the time. It typically lives in the background, more poetic or metaphoric than it is concrete.

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.jnevins.com/whitereading.htm" target="_blank">http://www.jnevins.com/whitereading.htm</a> I think this requires a couple of reads for comprehension. I don't think there's a better source, but I'll try to post more angles that relate to it. Some of the ideas reflect American consciousness pre-Sixties.

I have no idea how Equivalence might apply to non-meditative photography and I don't assert that the idea is relevant to everybody's work. But it is certainly relevant to the work of many who do not know where their own approach to photography was arguably born.

Here's some biographical information that may be relevant. As in any personal profile, some aspects are over-emphasized and more important aspects are missed. I think this author obsesses on White's sexuality and misses a lot about his developing life. Part two seems more to the point than part one IMO. <a href="http://www.vasculata.com/minor_white.htm">http://www.vasculata.com/minor_white.htm</a>

Thoughts? Were you previously aware of Minor White?

steve_swinehart · December 9, 2009

Were you previously aware of Minor White?

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Since 1968. I find his photography very interesting, but his thoughts about photography even more so.

These are some of his ideas that have directed me for years...

" I am always mentally photographing everything as practice" I have done that for years as I truly believe photographers need to practice making photographs just like a musician must practice in order to play music. The more photographs you try to see, allows you to find those things that only you see..which gets directly to -

"...all photographs are selfportraits. " Exactly.

"Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera." This is one that I like because it totally contadicts the "rules of composition" method of forcing the composition onto the subject.

"...innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child - with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder." And throw away the rules of composition rule book...

"One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are." That's what seems to be missing in so many photographs...the "what else they are" instead of a superficial rendering of a subject in an attempt to simply record "beauty."

"There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made." ...and how many posts on Photo.net are wrapped around the axle of HOW rather than why?

"Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams." And the problem is seeing the photograph...not making it.

"We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life." And when approached in that manner, photography has the power to help you learn more about yourself and your relationship to the world.

Lastly, I find it interesting that so many people ascribe the idea of "previsualization" to Ansel Adams when in fact Adams said "visualization" and Minor White said "previsualization."

jtk · December 9, 2009

Steve, thanks.

And thanks especially for that last corrective.

Previsualization is a learned perceptual skill. It's a lot like the skill some develop which allows them to estimate distances. It's not like "vision" or "creativity." The learning process is difficult. I struggled. A non-technical awareness even of the possibility of previsualization is, in itself, a revelation. Steve...do you agree?

tonmestrom · December 9, 2009

I couldn't agree more with what Steve has written. I would even go further in fact, I think White belongs to one of the most underrated or neglected photographers of his era.

As for the last, completely correct, corrective, previsualisation is nothing more or less than translating exact light readings in "Zones" or densities on the negative before the actual exposure. It's therefore very much a technical exercise that is at the very heart of the Zone system and deals with one thing and one thing alone. Control.

Norma Desmond · December 10, 2009

"Art is what is articulated and has import. The basic concept is the articulate but non-discursive form having import without conventional reference, and therefore presenting itself not as a symbol in the ordinary sense, but as a significant form, in which the factor of significance is not logically discriminated, but is felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function." --Suzanne Langer

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Equivalence goes so well with many of the things we've talked about for the last year or so in this forum, particularly Significance. This idea of Equivalence and link to the brief essay you provide is vital and exhilarating. It's about making photographs and about looking at them, experiencing them.

For me, it's about the maker's and the viewer's relationship to the photograph and to each other.

In my own photographs and experience, I use less abstraction per se than what White talks about in the article. The notion that clouds are stand-ins or mediums to convey what emotions he might have been feeling at the time is, as he says, pregnant. I think I perform that same sort of abstraction both in the creation of much more straightforward and obvious portraits and also in looking at all kinds of work. It doesn't have to be as distant and amorphous as clouds. Design and shape is all over the place, even in a very recognizable face. So, I can utilize Equivalence even in a portrait that is recognized for being a portrait. I also recognize it as light, shapes, texture, depth, etc. and express myself thusly.

I also don't limit it to photographer/image and viewer/image. (The article seems to stay with those two relationships, but it's likely a much wider theory and school of thought than what is presented in just the few paragraphs of this article.) Just as the clouds are not only what they appear to be, the emotions I express are not only what they are. The notions of Significance and Equivalence allow that there doesn't have to be a one-to-one correspondence between what I as the photographer am feeling and what the viewer may feel. If I am sad when I create something and I put the depth of my sadness into my work, that doesn't mean it is going to come out as sadness, though it might.

From the article: "what he had a feeling about was not for the subject he photographed, but for something else." I would add, for my own creating and viewing of photographs, that it's not just about the subject being an Equivalent. For me, the very feeling might be experienced as something else by the viewer, but even that different feeling would be connected by this same sort of Equivalence. The image of the cloud is to Stieglitz's feelings about the woman as the photographer's feeling of sadness is to whatever emotion the viewer might respond with.

I think it's also important to add that I may very well have a feeling for the subject itself that is part of my expression, but what the Equivalent might be in many cases is the feeling I also have for photographing the subject. I'm on a trip lately of distinguishing between the subject and the photograph of the subject. My feelings for a particular subject of a portrait of mine may be very different from (while still being related to) my feelings for the photograph I am about to take of that subject. The photographed subject elicits very different emotions (often) from the subject itself.

luis_g · December 10, 2009

Fred's right. White's system is far too large to do real justice to here.

I think it is important here to point out what MW considered other photographs that weren't Equivalents.

MW called them "Private Sketches", and defined them as: "A statement in an excessive symbolism" and..."a preliminary and/or incomplete statement"..."obscure".

BTW, this is one of the books that MW required his students to read. It's one of those things that leave a lot of people wondering what could a book like this possibly have to do with photography? Trust me on this, it has to do with you , and that has everything to do with your work.

http://www.amazon.com/Acting-First-Lessons-Theatre-Arts/dp/0878300007

...and if you want to read one of the books given to MW that lead him to Zen (and is also indirectly related to photography among many things), read this deceptively simple book (not for linear thinkers who want to stay that way):

http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Archery-Eugen-Herrigel/dp/0375705090

Julie H · December 10, 2009

I think White was teaching visual masturbation. Not that there's anything wrong with self-stimulation. Speaking figuratively, there's value in making oneself happy, and in finding out what ... works.

But it's essentially an internal private event. It's a little bit ridiculous to expect, to demand that others take an interest in what you're doing or in your results. I think one can use what one has learned about oneself and about new ways of looking from the sort of exercises White advocates, but I don't think it has direct use in the actual making of good photographs.

White reminds me of Walt Whitman:

O eternal circles, O squares, O triangles, O hypotenuses, O centres, circumferences, diameters, radiuses, arcs, sines, co-sines, tangents, parallelograms and parallelopipedons! O pipes that are not parallel, furnace pipes, sewer pipes, meerschaum pipes, briar-wood pipes, clay pipes! O matches, O fire, and coal-scuttle, and shovel, and tongs, and fender, and ashes, and dust, and dirt! O everything! O nothing! O myself! O yourself! O my eye!

[above is a parody]

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When he's not doing his I! I! I! ... O! O! O! OOOOOOOOOOH!!!! bit, I like his stuff.

luis_g · December 10, 2009

White's system was to me far less interesting than his pictures. I've done the exercises, and had my students do some of them, but many aspects can't be done without a MW present. For me, his outlook integrating body and mind, dance movements, increasing awareness & concentration, meditation, Polaroids and mysticism, even his open gayness expanded my conceptual space. The dichotomy between personal sketches, equivalents, and the dominant picture weren't so much concepts that I slavishly adopted or was boxed in by, but all these ideas and the exercises became grist for my mill, which I recombined for my own uses. He defined the metaphor of the mirror/windows thing very well, and long before Szarkowski arrived. The clarity of Minor's thinking and the way he had developed his ideas, down to the language, enabled me to understand the inner process better. It was (and is to this day) quite inspiring.

thomas_sullivan · December 10, 2009

White's Equivalents is great stuff. I believe that he had a great influence on me moving from the purely "real" of photography as the subject is "seen" by the photographer/artist to the "interpretive" in photography as the subject is "felt" by the photographer/artist.

luis_g · December 10, 2009

Julie typed: " I think White was teaching visual masturbation."

I will not make a bad joke about the Sound of One Hand Clapping.

jtk · December 10, 2009

fwiw, I don't think Minor White "demanded" anything of anybody...his students wanted to be there, they volunteered. He taught photographers, and especially photo teachers, to seek and create personally adequate audiences. Not for everybody.

Julie's work (online) would arguably not exist if Minor White hadn't opened photography to something more significant than symbolism, references, stories, illustration "of" things. Julie's lack of awareness about this is only intellectual...she's acutely tuned-in visually, as is obvious in her wonderful, distinctive imagery.

Although previsualization is/was heavily technical, it's not as engineering-primative as the reading of scenes and assigning of numbers that many view camera devotees thought it was, back when wooden field cameras and Pentax spotmeters were in vogue.

The most challenging and rewarding part of Zone System (Vs the whole of it) is imo the attention-paying and perceptual-learning, fluency part....the part that, like Equivalents, happens in the brain and perhaps the heart. That part can be as centrally important to DSLR/inkjet/Flickr as to any traditional film approach.

Norma Desmond · December 10, 2009

Julie--

Like John, I was surprised at your comment about someone demanding something regarding Equivalence. Can you elaborate and perhaps point to some specifics in the text where you found that to be true? As I said, there's a lot out there about Equivalence I haven't read and maybe White becomes more dogmatic about this than he is in the paper John linked to.

Also, I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say it's an internal event. What's an internal event? White is essentially talking about expression and communication, much of which I don't see as internal at all. I take him to be talking about very public matters . . . photographs. Yes, they have private components and are often made in private, but in many cases there is going to be a viewer to whom something will be expressed. That part does not seem internal.

Julie H · December 10, 2009

Fred,

On the second part of your post (re "internal"), where do you find him talking about communication? How are the things he's talking about available to people other than oneself except by accident or coincidence -- or verbal exhortation/explanation?

On my use of demand -- if you know more about how he taught and how his photographs were shown I think you would understand. To illustrate, I am going to give a long quote from an essay by James Baker Hall at the end of the Aperture monograph, Minor White: Rites and Passages:

[Paul Caponigro (one of White's students; his best student) is being quoted at the beginning.] "There was something in Minor straining always for a system, underpinnings for what he believed. First it was Zen, then it was hypnosis, then it was Esalen, then it was gestalt,, then it was Gurdjieff, then it was Casteneda, then it was astrology. Essentially dynamic things were all the time being turned into rituals and exercises. I was always coming up against something static where I felt there should be movement, words where there should be work, exercises instead of photographs. I kept wanting to say, What are we doing here, talking why aren't we out photographing? But it was hard to do, I didn't want to hurt him." 　 ... White himself noted several times "the dangers of these methods" and alluded to situations that seem to have gotten beyond his competence. He agreed also with the allegation that he prompted only versions of himself. When he started teaching at CSFA, he told his students that he wanted them to make their own pictures in their own way, and believed that that was where he stood, only to discover, as time passed, that he was teaching them "to make images I would have made had I been there." when school was out and he got into the field, he always found it difficult, "to photograph out of myself. I would be making the pictures I had been seeing my students make all year," imitating their imitations of him, at some crazy remove from the real thing. "It usually took me a month or so of camera work to get back through all that to myself." [ ... ] [Caponigro] was not objecting, as so many have, to the fact that Minor White played the guru, but to the quality of the performance. As a man on the path himself, he was determined to see that it was not turned into a trip, what Chögyam Trungpa calls spiritual materialism. They had the same argument again nearly ten years later, this time over an introduction that White wrote for the Aperture monograph Paul Caponigro. Caponigro was offended by the glibness and emotionalism of it; and he said so in no uncertain terms. "I didn't want anything to do with all that b*llsh*t. He was dressing me up in all this masturbatory mysticism, relating my work to the Gurdjieff ideas. He was rowing his boat in this beautiful sea of symbols and calling that the reality of consciousness. Giddy is what it was! I was still struggling as a human being and as a photographer, and I didn't want to participate in that incredible dabbling." When I asked White about the dispute, he ducked all the issues by saying, " Paul doesn't like to have his work talked about." Caponigro was objecting not to language, but to loose language; he wanted careful discrimination, precise observation, not self-indulgence, and much is revealed in Mnior White's refusal or inability to hear what he ws saying. ... [Ansel] Adams says "As far as I could observe, most of the people around him were his inferiors, not his peers." [Michael] Hoffman puts it much more bluntly, "Minor loved the idiots because they were no challenge."

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Believe it or not, I had not read this essay in at least twenty years; Caponigro's use of "masturbatory" is purely coincidental (or my use is coincidental since his came first).

Norma Desmond · December 10, 2009

Julie--

Thanks. As I said, this is my first exposure to White's writings, so this latter piece is helpful to my understanding of what you said about him. I'm mindful that student/teacher relationships have their own special dynamic, so I won't take this piece as any more than one in what's obviously a bigger puzzle. A student calling a teacher "masturbatory" could have lots of important history and many participating factors swirling around it. The coincidence, to me, is less important than your own use of the word. And, what White meant by all this is much less important to me than aspects of it that I find myself using or relating to. When I talked about it above, it was as a device to talk about stuff I look at and utilize in my own photographs.

(I was hoping my initial post would be built upon by others offering some specifics about their own work and its relationship to Equivalents or talking more specifically about the actual photographic connections I tried to make. Not you, Julie, because you don't see or feel a connection. Instead, the more combative responses seem to have captured the focus of the thread, perhaps only temporarily.)

Julie, for me, any idea related to Equivalence would be about "communication" and, were White here, I'd question him when he says in his penultimate paragraph that it's not.

For example, several paragraphs into the piece John linked to, White says:

"When a photographer presents us with what to him is an Equivalent, he is telling us [my emphasis] in effect, 'I had a feeling about something and here is my metaphor of that feeling.' The significant difference here is that what he had a feeling about was not for the subject he photographed, but for something else. He may show us [again, my emphasis] a picture of a cloud, the forms of which expressively correspond to his feelings about a certain person."

Now, maybe this is just bad word usage on his part and he should have rephrased. My claim would be it would be very difficult to talk about emotional photographic processes without at least the suggestion of a viewer and of some passing on of a vision and these emotions we're talking about. A friend, who I've been discussing this with since John posted it, said maybe the word "transference" would be better than "communication." Maybe "communication" is too literal and too dependent on "common symbols" to suit what White is really after.

Since White goes back and forth rather fluidly between how Equivalence works for the viewer and how it works for the photographer, I do read some level of communication into it:

From the article:

" . . . the word 'Equivalence' relates to what goes on in the viewer's mind as he looks at a photograph that arouses in him a special sense of correspondence to something that he knows about himself."

AND THEN

"[The photographer] may show us a picture of a cloud, the forms of which expressively correspond to his feelings about a certain person. As he saw the clouds he was somehow reminded of the person, and probably he hopes that we will catch, in the expressive quality of the cloud forms, the same feeling that he experienced. If we do and our feelings are similar to his, he has aroused in us what was to him a known feeling. [my emphasis]"

If White wasn't talking about communication (and I believe he was, despite his own protestations to the contrary), Equivalence relates to how photographs communicate, for me. Like I said, I'm less interested in an academic approach to what White might have meant and more interested in how these ideas might be meaningful to me and to my work and to others and their work.

luis_g · December 10, 2009

It wasn't just Caponigro, Adams, and Hoffman who had trouble with MW as the mysticism became more radical, varied and dominant. There were others who reacted similarly. A lot of them were old-school guys compared with White. And White had that apparent duality of Master/Fool thing going on. The portraits he collaborated on with Abe Frandlichj (sp?) turned a LOT of people off. It just wasn't proper for the West Coast Old Guard (leaving Imogen Cunningham out of it), and for a lot of people who feared MW's behavior could prove a setback (In reality he was more in step with the East Coast than most).

I think it unfair to characterize the people he taught as "inferiors". How many of AA's or Caponigro's students could be classified as "peers"? Very, very few, if any. And, if Ansel is right, then he was implying that Caponigro himself was an "inferior", since he was one of Minor's students. Let's not forget that Ansel also asked MW to come and teach with him, which he did for nine years. Most of Minor's students were also taking classes under Adams, Lange and Cunningham. Inferiors?

One thing that needs to be pointed out is that MW's explorations of inner space and interdisciplinary cross-fertilization were not unique or even rare at the time. Books like The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner , Tennis, the Inner Game, Story of O, etc, and the Sixties were all happening at the time. MW was a man of his time.

It is correct that MW's spiritual search was somewhat scattered and relatively quick to shift. This was in step with when, where and how he lived.

" Towards the end of his life he set up a program called "Creative Audience" at M.I.T., with the intention not of creating future artists, but of giving the public the reading tools which would favor better communication and richer exchanges."

--- Peter C Bunnell, A New History of Photography.

From White's own journal, Memorable Fancies: "Art is a communication of ecstasy. And ecstasy is bedded in the personality, so that self-understanding and revelation of self is the raw material of art"

______________

". I really wanted to hang out with Minor White because he pulled away from the usual grand landscape and started thinking more psychologically. He was more internal. I called him. He said, “I think I remember you. Why don’t you come to Rochester and hang out for awhile? He had a group of students in almost every day. We’d look at each others’ pictures. Good music all the time. A real creative photography working environment. He allowed me to stay there for three months. There were always professors coming through and other photographers and they’d wind up at Minor’s place. I met Beaumont and Nancy Newhall then. In 1958 and 1959 I worked on my own on the New England coastline. Then Minor called me in 1959 and said, “I need somebody to help me teach some workshops on the West Coast. Let’s spend the summer driving to the Coast, photographing along the way. We’ll camp out and then we’ll teach the workshops on the Coast and wind up at Ansel’s place in San Francisco and drink his whiskey.” It was a fabulous summer.

"I got my first exhibition through Minor in 1959 at the George Eastman House."

"I didn’t want to go through the Zen channel with him but nonetheless I worked harmoniously with him."

--- Paul Caponigro, 2006

http://www.photography.org/interviews/caponigro.php

___________________________________

luis_g · December 10, 2009

Still thinking about White's influences on me, probably the most significant was the potential for breaking with the seemingly tyrannical issue of the medium always being indexed to a referent, and transcending it without having to resort to abstraction. Not that I had never done, felt or read about that before, but MW's earlier writings and work had been sorted out in his own way, had roots going back to Stieglitz, and they did inform my work, illuminating my personal struggle.

jtk · December 10, 2009

Luis, I'm very happy to meet you here, in this discussion. Your understanding of White and his influence is similar to mine.

Many of us are secure enough and familiar enough with his work to form our own ideas about Minor White.

Suffice to say, Camponigro wasn't even arguably "the best" of White's students. He was, however, better-marketed than most, thanks substantially to Minor White.

That someone is preoccupied enough with one word, allegedly said by someone else, remembering it for twenty years only to use it specifically to demean an important photographer and teacher, tells its own ridiculous story. Julie, have you seen many of White's original prints? Familiar with his ideas on series? With actors? Known many of his students?

Ansel Adams and Minor White seemed oil and water. I've known quite a few of their students, who I remember almost as different species: Adams devotees have seemed to be engineering-types with few life questions, White's have been unsettled, seekers, into changes and joyeous screwing up, not to mention those non-Catholic disciplines, Zone/Zen/Gurdjieff etc. Some people get insecure when they notice others having more fun...wouldn't you agree? :-)

Ever since high school, cc 1959, I've found Dylan Thomas's urging to his dying father something to live by: "Do not go gentle into that good night." That relates, somehow. Did you know that Alan Watts smoked, drank, and womanized? I'm a Rolling Stones type of guy, never did like the Beatles as much. Why is it that I think Minor White important?

My impression of Ansel Adams was that he was jealous of Weston, jealous of White, happy with his business, and content with one specific aesthetic right up till the end. I didn't think he was at all perceptive outside his particular photographic niche, but that's not required, is it? Fine photography is plenty. The last I saw of him I was loading hundreds of pounds of dry chemistry into his Suburban...he tipped me by autographing his best book, Artificial Light.

Never met Minor White. He sure did make some people anxious! Not necessarily a "nice guy" but would that matter? Was Picasso nice, Andy Warhol? White's important work was born in the McCarthy era: religious nobodies were anxious about his explorations (eg zen and Gurdjieff). The worst things I know about him were that he'd been a Catholic and reportedly expected women to wait on him, instead of having fun with them (according to a couple of them).

A few still obsess on what they think some commity college photo teacher understood third hand about White's homosexuality. I think that bit was irrelevant or stimulating to most of his students...with the exception of one wonderful gay guy (who taught MW self-hypnosis, which was used subsequently as part of teaching method, and who did a lot of print spotting for Ansel Adams). The rest, with the exception of a couple of women, have seemed macho types, successful womanizers.

Norma Desmond · December 10, 2009

John--

You introduced a fascinating topic, full of possibilities.

So . . . where's the beef?

Let's get to it. Do you want to go somewhere with this?

joe_jackson4 · December 10, 2009

"I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit!"

John, sounds to me like this Minor White chap was interested in what makes a "good" picture... I guess I'm more interested in what makes photos (as opposed to other forms of pictures...) interesting to me, as a viewer. And, well, it's nothing to do with any "artsy" stuff...

jtk · December 10, 2009

Paul W...remembering Minor White after long neglect seems to me to have had to do with most of my life, which happens to have gravitated around photography on and off since I was 8, which was 1951. That means more to me than "art" could.

<a href="../casual-conversations-forum/00VCOn">http://www.photo.net/casual-conversations-forum/00VCOn</a>

Fred G, stumbling across the link above revived my thinking about Minor White. I'd vaguely remembered hearing about John Daido Loori Roshi but forgotten. He was just one of several photographic zen monks I'd heard about :-)

My indirect Minor White connection continued from 1967 or therabouts for another 10+ years until my MW-trained teacher died (Parkinsons, like Weston). At that point I felt freed from photography, became a graphic design and commercial photog, then a humble snapshooter, becoming somewhat serious again in recent years, thanks to scanning, inkjet, Photo.net etc.

You asked "where's the beef." I don't know. At the moment what's going on is an awareness that I've been influenced by something for a long time, and that many of the ideas I've expressed on this Forum have related closely to or even proceded directly from my exposure to Minor Whiteish ideas: For example, my understanding of "empathy" as "projection upon" vs the pop "fellow-feeling" understanding, or my distinction between "image" and "photograph," or my thinking about where an image resides (the brain).

Don't excuse my excessive meddling in your choices about your expressivity here. Forgive it if you want. I understand and accept that you are whoever you want to seem on the basis of your own choice alone.

I do wish to point out that you were fortunate to be interviewed/edited by Josh Root. I think he's more important to the success of Photo.net than all the contributors put together, and more important to photography generally than anybody in print.

joe_jackson4 · December 10, 2009

John, yes... I wonder if documentary photos of him (perhaps in his role as a teacher...) would be of more interest than his own output as a photographer...?

jtk · December 10, 2009

Paul, I feel sure that you're right. On another thread I pointed out that the ultimate gypsy guitar players have learned and taught face-to-face, and god himself is doing it online today: <a href="

fate_faith_change_chains · December 10, 2009

<a href="

all about playing music, it's not about showing people what you can do with a piece of wood that got strings on it."</a>

or...not about showing people what you can do with a metal / wooden / plastic box that has a hole in it.

luis_g · December 11, 2009

Paul: " John, yes... I wonder if documentary photos of him (perhaps in his role as a teacher...) would be of more interest than his own output as a photographer...?"

Maybe to you, John and/or people who idolized him. In the real world market, the answer to your question is no.

Here's three for Paul and John:

http://www.aperture.org/exposures/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/white_minor.jpg

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.thecameraworkgallery.org/photos/minor_long_web.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.thecameraworkgallery.org/history.html&usg=__NYY3xgeu0mz4YWfHOzyeIyW-rXs=&h=197&w=500&sz=30&hl=en&start=146&um=1&tbnid=1qFVIFk1SaOSFM:&tbnh=51&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3DPhotographs%2Bof%2BMinor%2BWhite%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D140%26um%3D1

http://www.aperture.org/exposures/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/white001.jpg

Norma Desmond · December 11, 2009

"Don't excuse my excessive meddling in your choices about your expressivity here. Forgive it if you want. I understand and accept that you are whoever you want to seem on the basis of your own choice alone."

</blockquote>

John, really, enough already. STOP!

Equivalence. It's important. Say something. Relate to it. Talk about photographs, perhaps your photographs, perhaps your process, and Equivalence.

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"Equivalence" / Minor White / about images

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