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Minor White, Space, Analysis, Recognition: A Style Analysis for Photographers, 1946-1949
SFMOMA 

Artwork Info

Artwork title: Space, Analysis, Recognition: A Style Analysis for Photographers

Artist name: Minor White

Date created: 1946-1949

Classification: artist's book

Medium: book maquette with 7 gelatin silver prints with typed manuscript

Dimensions: 7 × 9 in. (17.8 × 22.9 cm) 

Date acquired: 2023

Credit: Collection SFMOMA / Gift of Gary B. Sokol

Copyright: Reproduced with the permission of the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. © Trustees of Princeton University

Permanent URL: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2023.418.1-8

Artwork status: Not on view at this time.

For Minor - Open Mic

Larry Wolf, Slide for Queer History Open Mic (2026)
at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives

For Minor

Have you ever been in love?

Alfred Stieglitz to Minor White, 1946

Let’s begin our story --

A photograph

A man

In an archway

A dark street

Waterfront

Portland

The West Coast Portland

Portland

en route to Seattle 

1937

29

Or for me

East Coast

Arriving in Burlington

Green Mountains and a lake

1976

25

Arrived with an Argus

with a Nikon

With a bundle of sonnets

with a sketchbook

Stopped for a few days

for a first real job

That became a few years

that became my entire professional life

We knew what we were looking for

Men

On the waterfront

Cruising

Ancient blood sport? Hunter and hunted?

Ritualistic bonding? Self and other?

Me seeking you

Across decades

Across worlds

Yet

All one world

College behind us

Traveling light

Possessions given away

Or left for safe keeping

That proved not so safe 

- the many poems, with a friend, vanish

- boxes mouldering, soaked in a garage

- imperfect archives

Who are you?

A poet 

Changing mediums

Changing homes

Traveling with a typewriter

And a camera

And me?

Software for a living

Yet

Also

Typewriter and camera

Companions

Fingertips pounding impressions in paper

Hand-held box of sensitive film 

Seeking resonance 

… spirit

… unspeakable 

Seeking love

Since high school

At least

HOMO sexual

A fight with parents

You left

And returned

And it was never spoken of again

I kept it on the down low

Hidden even from myself

Until

That 21st summer, 1972

Kelly and Al

Two men

So clearly in love

I knew the mathematician

The other?

Cast a warming glow

Together, an existence proof

Opening a door to personal possibility

For you

The heartbreak of ‘33

The Sonnets, winter in ‘36

An unnamed man

Held

Private 

Then drafted in a war

Mostly at a desk

Time to write

Retyping the sonnets

You returned to 

Your personal battle

Too many times love has come and gone 

With too small fulfillment in its wake 

For me not to hear in its gay tone 

A fugue of tears across the shining lake. 

…

A man desiring men, nothing better dreamt 

For the genial exercise of self contempt.

You said there was no time for photography

Yet there are photographs

Tender portraits of men

Comrades

Post-war

The first big exhibition

Those portraits

Poems of war

The gallery said -- too much --  remove the poems

You withdrew it all

Withdrew

Pulled back

Years later

You published

The photographs

The poems

Amputations

In 1947 and ‘48

Tom held your attention

Naked to your gaze

Three bursts of making

A small book of prints

A copy for you

A copy for Tom

Your yearning bleeds from the photographs

Physical 

Messy 

Intimate 

Left to wonder

Were there others?

I too

Keep coming back

Your sonnets

Your photographs 

Those beautiful tender male bodies

The photographer-poet exposed

I reach out

Finding you

Your art

In my heart

Another queer life reclaimed

Much love

Rest in joy

Rest in passion

Thank you

Larry Wolf, Chicago (2026)

Notes

Minor White wrote one hundred sonnets during the winter of 1936/37. Eighty-nine of them survive in his archives. 

He wrote: 

a love affair of short duration, spring of ‘33 probably, left an indelible mark. The Sonnet Sequence … covers the dawn, noon, dusk, and long black night strewn with the barbed wire and thistles of loving a man instead of a woman.

…

The decision to return to photography was based on what had been learned writing verse. I said in effect, "in becoming a photographer I am only changing mediums, the essential core of both verse and photography is poetry."

 Minor White, Memorable Fancies (i958/2025)

Credits

Minor White, Arches of the Dodd Building, Southwest Front Avenue and Ankeny Street (1938) New Deal Art Project, U.S. General Services Administration

http://www.portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=57331;type=101 

https://art.gsa.gov/artists/1985/minor-white/objects/list 

Minor White, Fragments from Sonnet 9 and Sonnet 21, Sonnet Sequence, Minor White Archive, MWA A 093, Folder 1735 (1937-38), Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/collections/themes/minor-white-archive 

Sonnet Sequence

Larry Wolf, Sonnet Sequence Chapbook (2026)
Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

Happy Birthday Minor White

Larry Wolf, Minor White 118th Birthday (2026)

My Father 1977

Larry Wolf, Merwin on 5th Avenue (1977)

203 Park Avenue

… I arrived at "The House" - 203 Park Avenue, Arlington Heights, Massachusetts. It was my address for three of the next seven years. At that time I wasn't aware of the history of the other "workers" at Minor's various houses. The list included Walter Chappell, Michael Hoffman, John Upton, Paul Caponigro, Peter Bunnell, Douglas Prudden, David Plowden, and Bill Giles. Nor was I aware of the legion who had studied and worked with Minor, among them: Nathan Lyons, Jerry Uelsmann, A. A. Dutton, Carl Chiarenza, Ken Josephson.

Photo: Abe Frajndlich,
203 Park Ave, May 1975

The house was comfortless. It was designed that way. Tall, narrow, and white, it was set back from the street and hidden behind evergreens. Each room had a specific function. There was a viewing room off the front hall. It had a wall rack for photographs, suitable lighting, and almost nothing else but a couple of straight-backed chairs and a plant or two. In the room beyond it Minor sometimes received visitors. That room was more inviting. Some of his well-known photographs hung on the walls; there was a fireplace, more plants, and several cushioned chairs. The kitchen was at the back of the house. On the floor above, there was a study, a guest room, Minor's bedroom, a print room, and a bath. On the third floor, there were student quarters and the meditation room, and far below in the basement, the darkroom. Nowhere in the house was one invited to relax, to laugh, to gossip, or to waste time frivolously.

It was, however, an amazing place to live. In the library were all the copies of Aperture; monographs from a multitude of admirers and colleagues; many important photographic texts on the Zone System, photo-chemistry, and photo-history; as well as esoteric and mystical texts. There were also photographs from former and present students propped up on his desk and lying in stacks on the bookshelf. The phone rang constantly. Peter Bunnell was calling, or Ansel Adams, or Barbara Morgan. One never knew who was ringing the doorbell: a student with a portfolio, a curator from a prestigious museum, a critic or historian. We students knew we were at a generative nexus, and that was exciting. 

... There was a daily ritual in the house. At 6:30 in the morning the sound of Zen bells awakened us for meditation. 

... A painful awareness of Minor's death came six months after the fact, when I was working with Joe DeMaio in dismantling the darkroom. It was a maze of pipes and equipment, interlocking through three rooms. Each piece of copper tubing severed from the matrix and carried out bcame a graphic emblem of the house no longer pumping the vitality that it had for years. Those long lengths of copper resembled the tall gaunt figure he had become. When we shut off the water, it hit me that Minor was now really dead.

from Frajndlich, Abe - Lives I’ve Never Lived : A Portrait of Minor White (1983
[WorldCat]

[book review: John Upton in Aperture, Summer 1984]

Sweet 'Enuff

Martin Wong, Sweet 'Enuff (1988) - right panel
at Wrightwood 659 / photo: Larry Wolf 2026