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Book Bag: Minor White's 'Memorable Fancies'
13 March 2025
We have usually read through the whole book before we review it. But after a few weeks paging through Minor White's Memorable Fancies, we decided we'd rather stretch our pleasure out a bit and make it last, as Harvey Mudrick used to say at UCSB about deliciously long books.
And this is a long book at 544 pages with 100 illustrations.
It is, in short, his previously unpublished daybooks, written between 1931 and 1976. Which makes publication of this historic work something of an event.
It's the first time the entire text has been published. All the diary entries, the photography lessons and the ruminations on aesthetics by one of the more thoughtful and articulate masters of the art.
Which should give you pause.
How do you begin a 544-page monograph in 1931? What do you use to capture your thoughts? How do you illustrate them with photographs? And what about revisions?
There was no app for that.
And consequently the "pages" Minor White constructed are, themselves, individual works. The publisher has generously illustrated a few of them side-by-side with the typeset (and much more readable) version to give you an idea.
So there is a lot to absorb as you turn the pages on this well-made volume that can also be persuaded to lie flat rather easily.
Image 1 of 4: Lay-flat binding with sown signatures Image 2 of 4: Title page Image 3 of 4: Facing original Image 4 of 4: Illustrations throughout Image 1 of 4: Lay-flat binding with sown signatures
Details. Mouse over or tap for captions.
So, you want to know, who was Minor White?
A native of Minneapolis, he was graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.S. degree in 1933. He worked for the Works Progress Administration and taught photography in Portland, Ore., until he was drafted in 1942.
When we was discharged in 1945, he went to New York to study with Meyer Shapiro, who himself was a pre-eminent art historian and aestheticist. And he met everybody: Beaumont and Nancy Newhall,Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz.
In 1946, he moved to San Francisco to teach at the California School of Fine Arts, run by Ansel Adams. They became friends and founded Aperture magazine with Dorothea Lange, the Newhalls, Barbara Morgan and a few others in 1952.
From 1953 to 1957 he worked with the Newhalls at the George Eastman House in Rochester. He taught at RIT and MIT, cofounded the Society for Photographic Education and edited Aperture until 1970.
And it's all in this book.
More than you can guess, in fact. The savings he got when he bought sleeping bag included. And this note from 1963:
All the way to Portland with a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker from New Jersey -- name? He was pleasant to be silent with.
Nothing, it seems, was off limits for his mind. Or his daybook. Which speaks to his integrity as an artist. You get the whole Minor White here.
The volume also includes a hefty introduction (don't skip over it) by Todd Cronen, professor of art history at Emory University. And a very thorough and helpful index.
On Mar. 25, Todd Cronan, coeditor of the volume, will moderate a conversation with the photographers Lyle Ashton Harris, Aspen Mays and Mark Armijo McKnight about White's impact and influence.
We can't, in conclusion, call it merely "highly recommended." We have to say it is nothing less than required reading.
Minor White: Memorable Fancies, published by Princeton University Press, 544 pages, $$35. Ebook or PDF available for 30 percent off at $24.50 with code PUP30.
Minor White: Memorable Fancies
One of the most significant unpublished texts in the history of photography, Memorable Fancies is the daybooks of Minor White, an artist who played a leading role in shaping the practice of photography in postwar America. Begun in the early 1930s and taking its name from a series of dialogues in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, these writings are part diary, part photography manual and part aesthetic treatise. Minor White: Memorable Fancies presents this work in its entirety for the first time, offering an intimate look at the ideas and interior life of one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century.
In this beautifully illustrated volume, the art historian Todd Cronan sheds light on White's guiding concerns and the intersections between White's writings and his public practice as a photographer and influential publisher and teacher. White's journal is accompanied by an array of stunning photographs by White and his contemporaries as well as annotations that provide background and context, illuminating White's life and career while capturing a vibrant and inventive moment in the history of modern photography.
Challenging our assumptions about photographic agency and the interplay between art and life, Minor White: Memorable Fancies engages deeply with the possibilities of photography, its effect on viewers, and its relationship to chance observation.
Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum. Minor White (1908-1976) was an American photographer, writer, educator and cofounder of Aperture magazine. Todd Cronan is professor of art history at Emory University.
