Steiglitz' Clouds

[Ken Lee]

Looks more like a mtn range with stripes of glaciers. I love how Minor White's own
"equivalents" were almost metaphors for something else. Or maybe that's just my own
version of a Freudian slip for getting itchy to get back to the mtns soon!

That was one of his areas of exploration. He called it "Things for what else they are". I presume he meant that some shapes and forms resemble others, although from a completely different context.

We see this fairly often when people make "abstract" photos (for example, Aaron Siskind) where a fragment of a wall might resemble a face or a Chinese character. Some of Weston's peppers and other vegetables look like human limbs... it's a classic. Steigliz's clouds fall into the same category rather often: they tend to evoke something "more than" the literal subject.

Some people like this approach more than others, but it's a way to add one or more "layers" of content to a photo. Minor White was a mystic, and one of the core propositions of mysticism is that things are not as they seem... nor are they otherwise

Much of his work evokes the dream state as much as the waking state.

[Brian C. Miller]

Looks more like a mtn range with stripes of glaciers. I love how Minor White's own
"equivalents" were almost metaphors for something else. Or maybe that's just my own version of a Freudian slip for getting itchy to get back to the mtns soon!

Are you referring to the, "Point Lobos, California, Minor White, 1951," image? The seagull sh*t on the rocks with the ocean in the background?

[Drew Wiley]

Yeah ... maybe the real Pt Lobos print doesn't look like that, but on my office monitor it
sure does. My first ten yrs of printmaking had a lot of metaphysical deliberately misunderstood images, often with a complex focal plane, though I never ever thought of
them as abstract. "Abstract" in photog too often just becomes some pattern study mimicking painting, and not photog itself does best. Minor White was a bit heavy in his
doctrine of both equivalents and the zone system. Reminded me of the crazy professor of
"Back to the Future", or the ghost of Stiegliz come back merely to haunt us ... but I really
do like his prints.

[Greg Miller]

Are you referring to the, "Point Lobos, California, Minor White, 1951," image? The seagull sh*t on the rocks with the ocean in the background?

That isn't whale sperm on the rocks???

[Brian C. Miller]

That isn't whale sperm on the rocks???

No. Whales that get that close have this happen to them:
1970, Oregon Department of Transportation whale removal, and here, and here, and here, and here, etc.