Guess I didn't read my email when this was posted. Love it, so much sensation in the textures represented. I'm finding that my earlier images of the sand dunes are more interesting to me now with lighter tonal values… so I'm revising all the images with similar visual attributes. That's a first for me. Have others revisited earlier works with a heavy revisionists agenda?Originally Posted by David Lobato
Writings in the landscape are ephemeral poetry.
...in between ?
always trying to to get one's head above water and get reconciled with the different voices/languages on oneself,
words, feelings, sensation and why not: intuitions
suddenly something is given, removes me, shows a possibility
the process is renewed
that is one powerful reason why "the making of a picture" can relate me to this singular B&W world !
Doesn't it ?
I've been really struggling to understand this, it's such a complex yet simple thing. I welcome feedback and please tell me if I'm missing the idea behind this.
4x5 cropped to 2x5 TMY-2 in Rodinal
Not sure where the truth lives, but I think maybe 1/3-1/2 of the images here don't exhibit equivalence or I'm thick and ignorant to not see it. It's perhaps a bit of both.
To help you:
In the book, "Minor White Manifestations of the Spirit", page 4 talks about White learning equivalence from Stieglitz. If you've got that book or can see it at the library, I think that's a pretty solid practical basis for equivalence, due to the influence of these two photographers. (I'm not sure what is fair use for showing that page here)
Separate from this description, I've heard Paul Caponigro mention "what else it is" as being important without saying the word equivalence, He was a student of White, and was speaking to a general audience and not a photo history audience.
Excellent comments.
Here are two different articles and a critique on Manifestations… both show a wide variety of images from an exhibition of his work. The quote on Lenscratch is good as a reference too. The critique, by James Miller, mentions Minor's equivalence and suggests one series of images was his best:
Sound of One Hand is certainly one of White’s most distinctive sequences for that reason, and is the culmination of his absorption of Stieglitz’s theory of equivalence, which opened up abstraction and metaphor to photography. “White pushed himself to do the impossible,” writes Martineau, “to make the invisible world of the spirit visible through photography.” It was a bold and unusual effort—probably one of the boldest and most unusual in photography at the time.
The critique, in full. And the images from Sound
Looking at all these jpeg images, it's a little easier to get or (better) sense what Minor was doing with the camera. Abstraction was a common element, but not exclusively and (for Minor) every image was a reflection of himself and, frequently other references to a world outside of the frame.
Aline Smithson on her blog Lenscratch
and
Amber Terranova in the New Yorker
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