Clarence Hudson White - Style and Technique

Style and Technique

From the beginning White's vision was heavily influenced by the culture and social ways of a small town in Ohio. He "celebrated elemental things, the time spent playing in the fields or woods, the simple pleasure of unhurried living, the playing of games in interior spaces…. White, growing up within an extended family, knowing nothing else, had no real sense of other societies and his pictures thus had a kind of fortification against the outside. They were his private epic."

Of necessity, White depicted this cultural milieu with an extraordinary rendering of light. Due to very long hours at his accounting job, often going from 7 am to 6 pm six days a week, White most often photographed his subjects just after dawn and just before dusk. Once he wrote "My photographs were less sharp than others and I do not think it was because of the lens so much as the conditions under which the photographs were made ‒ never in the studio, always in the home or in the open, and when out of doors at a time of day very rarely selected for photography." He also shared an intimate familiarity with his subjects, who most often were his wife, her three sisters and his own children.

Nonetheless, White's photographs were not casually posed; he carefully controlled every detail in his scenes, sometimes even having special costumes created for his models. He saw in his mind exactly what he wanted and then made it happen through his camera. It's been said that "White is most significant in the history of photography because, in his early years, he redefined the nature of picture-making, creating a distinctly modern idiom for his own time…. He reduced his compositions to very simple elements of form, and by experimenting with principles of design derived largely from Whistler and Japanese prints, he created a person style that was unique for photography.

Peter Bunnell further wrote "The qualities that make White's photographs memorable have to do with both form and content. In his finest pictures the disposition of every element, of each line and shape, is elevated to an expressive intensity few photographers managed to attain ... White was able to transform the sensory perception of light into an exposition of the most fundamental aspect of photography - the literal materialization of form through light itself. His prints, mostly in the platinum medium, display a richness, a subtlety, and a luminosity of tone rarely achieved in the history of photography."

While White mostly is known for his family scenes and portraits, his "…work is not genre because it really tells us very little about the individuals shown or the world they live in. White subject's are apparently just there, and that's about the end of it. What we seem to have here is a 'pure photography', similar perhaps to the earlier 'pure painting' of the nineteenth century."

In terms of White's style it is important note that while he spent almost all of his life from 1906 to 1925 living in New York City, there is nothing in his photographs to indicate he ever lived there. There were no streets scenes or people in the city, no buildings, bridges, ships or automobiles. Unlike most of his photographer friends, he chose to ignore the very place he lived except for the access it gave him to promote his work and to teach others. Although he was pragmatic in his need to earn a living and advance his art, he remained true to his small town roots throughout his life.

Throughout most of his life White was limited financially in what camera and lenses he used. He once declared "The most important factor in the selection being a $50.00 limit." For most of his time in Newark he used a 6 1/2" x 8 1/2" view camera with a 13" Hobson portrait lens.

White is known to have worked in the following processes: platinum, gum-platinum, palladium, gum-palladium, gun, glycerin developed platinum, cyanotype and hand-coated platinum. His platinum prints utilized salts of platinum instead of the silver salts used in modern platinum prints, resulting in a greater range and richness of middle tones.

White sometimes printed the same image using different processes, and as a result there are significant variations in how some of his prints appear. His platinum prints have a deep magenta-brown tone, for example, whereas his gum prints have a distinct reddish hue. Photogravures of his images in Camera Work, which he considered to be true prints, were more neutral, tending toward warm black-and-white tones.

Before 1902 White dated his photographs according to when the negative was made, even though he might not have printed it that same year. For his later prints he often assigned two dates, one when the image was taken and another when it was printed.