Clarence H. White

platinum print, tipped at the top corners to Japan tissue, the photographer's credit and sitter's name in an unidentified hand in pencil on the reverse, matted, circa 1900

A photogravure of this image:

Camera Work, No. 23, July 1908

This platinum print, with warm chocolate-brown tones, is in generally excellent condition. There is age-darkening and foxing on the reverse. The thin tissue mount is age-darkened, foxed, and lightly soiled. The reverse is annotated 'Portrait of Julia Hall McCure [sic] by Clarence White' in an unidentified contemporary hand and numbered '44' (circled) and 'D-80-131' in an unidentified modern hand in pencil.
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Clarence H. White began photographing in his early twenties in Newark, Ohio, and exhibited his work to positive reviews almost immediately.   By 1898, he had met Alfred Stieglitz, who elected White an honorary member of the New York Camera Club and organized a one-man exhibition of his work in 1899.  As a founding member of Stieglitz's Photo-Secession group, White participated in nearly every major photographic exhibition in the United States and Europe in the late 19th and early 20^th centuries, including the New School of American Photography in London (1900) and the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo (1910).  In 1907, he began to devote his energy almost exclusively to teaching photography.  He taught at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and, in 1910, founded a summer school of photography at Georgetown Island, Maine, with fellow Photo-Secessionists Gertrude Käsebier and F. Holland Day.  In 1914, he opened the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York City where he taught, among others, Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge, Margaret Bourke-White, Karl Struss, Ralph Steiner, and Doris Ulmann.

As a young man in Newark, learning the craft of photography on his own, White used his friends and family as subjects, creating a body of work remarkable for both its technical and aesthetic sophistication.  In the print of The Arbor offered here, White's deft handling of the light and dark values creates an evocative but unsentimental study of his subject. 

While the provenance of the Clarence H. White photographs in the Licking County Historical Society is unknown, it is speculated that they were given to the Society by members of the Newark community who had served as the photographer's models.  The model in The Arbor is believed to be Julia Hall McCune Flory, a Newark resident who graduated from Ohio's Denison University and went on to study in New York City at the Art Students League.  Flory settled in Cleveland after her marriage, where she was an active member of the city's arts community.  It is possible that the White photographs offered here came originally from Flory's collection.