Clarence H. White

platinum print, the photographer's monogram in red pencil on the image, tipped at the top corners to a larger cream-colored mount, signed by the photographer in pencil on the mount, matted, framed, The American Federation of Arts exhibition label on the reverse, 1898

Wilmington, Delaware Art Museum, Clarence H. White, April - May 1977, and traveling to:

New York, The International Center of Photography, July - September 1977

Granville, Ohio, Denison University Art Gallery, Clarence H. White: Photographs from the Newark Years, September - October 1979

Columbus Museum of Art, 130 Years of Ohio Photography, December 1978 - January 1979

Long Beach, University Art Museum, California State University, A Collective Vision: Clarence H. White and His Students, November - December 1985, and traveling to:

The Oakland Museum of Art, February - April 1986

Corpus Christi, Art Museum of South Texas, July - August 1986; and

Minneapolis Institute of Art, November 1986 - January 1987

New York, The American Federation of Arts, Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts, July - October 2000

This print:

Symbolism of Light: The Photographs of Clarence H. White (Delaware Art Museum, 1977, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 19

Clarence H. White (Aperture, 1979), p. 51

Another print of this image:

Life Library of Photography: Great Photographers, 1940 - 1960 (New York, 1971), p. 126

Photogravures of this image:

Camera Notes, Vol. 4, No. 4, April 1901

Camera Work, No. 3, July 1903

This beautiful warm-toned platinum exhibition print has deep blackish-brown dark tones. The print is in generally excellent condition. Upon close inspection, small deposits of original retouching are visible. The top right corner has a miniscule crease where the photograph has been tipped to its mount. The photograph is tipped to a thin cream-colored mount. The area directly surrounding the print and the periphery of the mount are lightly age-darkened. There are 2 strips of brown paper tape remains at the top edge of the front of the mount. The reverse of the mount has uniform striations of age-darkening from a previous backing.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Clarence H. White's Telegraph Poles offers a spare and modern view of Newark, Ohio, where the photographer lived from 1887 to 1906.  It was in Newark that White began to photograph, while working as a clerk at Fleek & Neal, the grocery wholesaler where his father was employed.   White's distance from the artistic epicenter of New York City makes his development as a photographer of real talent and sensitivity all the more remarkable.  In many respects, Telegraph Poles shows that White, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, was further advanced on the path to modernism than many of his contemporaries.  Alfred Stieglitz's The Steerage, a touchstone of photographic modernism, was made nine years later, and Paul Strand's great work would not begin until the latter half of the 1910s.  The strikingly early date of White's Telegraph Poles makes White's instinctive grasp of modernism all the more significant. 

White exhibited his work frequently from the very start of his career, and his photographs were widely admired.  Alfred Stieglitz recognized the quality of his work early on, and included Telegraph Poles in Camera Notes in 1901, and again in an early issue of Camera Work (Number 3, July 1903).  As of this writing, only three other early prints of this image have been located: a platinum print in The Museum of Modern Art, New York; a hand-coated gum bichromate print in the Princeton University Art Museum; and a platinum print, formerly in the collection of the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, sold in these rooms on 11 October 2005 (Sale 8115, Lot 107).  The Princeton Museum also owns a pigment print of the image made from the original negative by Clarence White student and frequent model, Julia Hall McCune Flory, also a Newark resident. 

Telegraph Poles shows a small section of what had once been an extensive series of canals built throughout Ohio, and extending to the Great Lakes.  The canals facilitated trade and the transfer of freight throughout the state and, via the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal, to the east coast.  Soon after their construction, the canals were made obsolete by the incursion of the railroad.  In White's day, remnants of the canal were still present in Newark.  Largely abandoned as a method of transport, the disused waterway served as an atmospheric reminder of the town's past.