Clarence Hudson White

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Boy with a Cart, platinum print by Clarence H. White of his oldest son, … (credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born April 8, 1871, West Carlisle, Ohio, U.S. — died July 8, 1925, Mexico City, Mex.) American photographer and teacher. White taught himself photography and photographed his friends and family. His work brought him into contact with important figures in American art photography, including Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz. In 1902 White helped found the Photo-Secession, a group of photographers that promoted Pictorialism, a fine-arts approach to photography. In 1914 White opened a school of photography in New York City. There he influenced a new generation of photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange.

For more information on Clarence Hudson White, visit Britannica.com.

(b West Carlisle, OH, 8 April 1871; d Mexico City, 8 July 1925). American photographer and teacher. A self-taught photographer, he began taking photographs in 1893 and soon developed a style that showed the influence of Whistler, Sargent and Japanese prints. He was elected to the LINKED RING group of Pictorial photographers in 1900 and was a leading member of the PHOTO-SECESSION from 1902. His evocative photographs of rural landscapes and of his family celebrate the joys and virtues of the simple, middle-class way of life that existed in the USA before World War I (e.g. Ring Toss, 1899; Washington, DC, Lib. Congr.).

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White, Clarence (1871-1925), American pictorialist, and founder of two influential schools of photography. He achieved early recognition for his soft-focus photographs, often depicting women and children in domestic or natural settings. Founder of the Newark Camera Club in 1898, White was intimately involved in photographic politics 1898-1910. A member of the Linked Ring and founding member of the Photo-Secession, he was also co-founder of the Pictorial Photographers of America in 1916. Always in need of money to support his family, he took professorial jobs and founded the Seguinland School of Photography in rural Maine, to which Fred Holland Day and Gertrude Käsebier, both lifelong friends, contributed their teaching services. With students ranging from Dorothea Lange to Paul Outerbridge at New York's Clarence H. White School of Photography, which he started in 1914, White helped bridge the gap between pictorialist and modernist styles. His 1925 trip to Mexico with students resulted in a fatal heart attack, but not before White's own photography, which he had long neglected, was revitalized with a portfolio of pictures emphasizing geometric forms.

— Philip Clark

Bibliography

• Yochelson, B., Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography (1996)