Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 23))

CLARENCE H. WHITE.

gMONG Clarence H. White’s prints are several woodland
scenes. Rocks and trees are interspersed, and a Hermes
looks down smiling on some boys wrestling in play, whose
straight young bodies are dappled with sun and shadow.
They are pictures that suggest the idea, old even in Greek times, of a young
world, fresh as the buds that in the past three days have gathered on the
poplar which I see from my city window, a spray of delicate purity against
the shabby bricks beyond it. It is an exquisite reminder that the world, the
real world of nature and the spirit, is still young; and it is in this young
world that the artist in White, it seems to me, lives and has its being.
Then I recall another of his prints. A woman’s figure, moving away
from us along a garden pathway. She is abroad in the fragrance of the early
morning sunshine, that is as yet too cool to disperse the film of mist which
clings to the trees and grass and even envelopes her form. Then another
picture in which, as the twilight slips away, a woman and a child stand,
motionless as shades, gazing down over a vista of descending grass-land,
ending in a mystery of trees. And yet another. It is but a slope of
foreground, and a stretch of water separated from the sky by the thread-line
of the opposite shore. In the distribution, however, and relation of the
masses, the selection of lines, and the tonality of color-values, it is a
composition that recalls the choiceness of a Japanese print.
Remembering these pictures, I seem to find in them a clue to the charm
that White’s work possesses. There is, firstly, a peculiar refinement of
feeling in the conception of the subject and choice of details to embroider
it, and an unfailing resourcefulness in the arrangement of the composition.
Secondly, a reverence of feeling, due to a consciousness of the mystery of
beauty. Thirdly, the source of expression in all his pictures is a suscepti-
bility to the effects of light. And fourthly, informing expression, feeling
and composition, is a spirit that maturity of experience has not divested of its
essential youthfulness. And all these qualities are in him the product of
instinct.
Psychologically considered, he represents a curiously interesting example
of an artist being born, not made. His early environment—a small western
town, and his particular occupation of a clerkship in a store offered neither
encouragement nor impediment to his artistic development. Nor had he
any opportunities of private study, except such as Camera Notes suggested
to him. He bought a camera and, for the most part, was forced to go his
own way. It lead him in directions opposed to the current traditions of
photography. Thus he leveled his camera directly toward the light. It was
the mistake of ignorance, as any photographer would have told him. Yet
it proved to be the opening up of new possibilities. He had followed an
instinct that was truer than tradition. That instinct was toward light;
to make light, rather than light and shadow, the basis of his study. In
doing so, he was not aware that he was setting photography in line with

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