WHITE FAMILY HISTORY
This article was compiled by Ruth
Royer White's niece, Cathleen Dobbins Groves of Woodside NY, in
September, 1994. It is on file at Cedar Hill Cemetery, Newark Ohio,
with a letter releasing it for public use.
Clarence Hudson White, Sr. was born in West Carlisle, Ohio in 1871. In
1887, at the age of 16, he moved with his family to Newark, Ohio and
became a bookkeeper at Fleak & Neal wholesale grocers. He married
Jane Felix and they had three sons: Lewis, Mynard and Clarence Jr.
Clarence White became interested in photography in 1893, but initially
only as a substitute for painting, a profession of which his parents
disapproved. He photographed mainly in the platinum medium, which
involved leaving the negatives outside in the sun to develop. The
materials for taking his pictures were expensive and the process long
and tedious, so in his beginning years he could only take one or two
pictures a week.
He would spend all week long planning exactly the effect he waited to
achieve, then over the weekend he would try it out. He saw photography
not as a way of recording precise reality (as it had theretofore been
used), but as an artistic medium to express moods, scenarios and larger
truths about nature and human nature.
The world he knew was the village of Newark - often simple and graceful
- and he tried to bring out the best of those qualities. He frequently
used his wife Jane and her sisters Margaret, Elizabeth and Letitia as
his models, and delighted in designing long flowing, timelessly styled
dresses for them to wear.
In the words of Peter C. Bunnell, a protege of Clarence White Jr. and
currently Curator of Photography and Professor of the History of
Photography and Modern Art at The Art Museum of Princeton University:
"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 transformed 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 ... display a richness, a subtlety, and a luminosity
of tone rarely achieved in the history of photography."
This "hobby" of Clarence White's consumed more and more of his time and
interest. He continually experimented to see what effects he could get,
and at some point he began sending his prints to other innovative
photographers he had heard and read about, for their comments. One of
these people was Alfred Stieglitz in New York, who recognized artistic
genius when he saw it. He encouraged Clarence White to exhibit his
works - and indeed Stieglitz exhibited them himself - and by 1899 White
was receiving international recognition.
With Stieglitz's encouragement, White quit his bookkeeping job to
devote his full attention to photography. And in 1906 Stieglitz managed
to persuade the Whites to move to New York City, where Clarence became
one of the founding members of the "Photo-Secession" movement - made up
of people like himself who had what at the time was the radical idea
that photography could and should be an art form.
White became friends and associates with Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon
Coburn, Gertrude Kasebier, Fred Holland Day and Baron Adolph de Heyer,
among others, and was involved with the very first group to experiment
with color photography in America in 1907.
The Whites bought a summer house in New Caanan, Connecticut, and also
bought and renovated an old home on the coast of Maine, where they
tried to spend at least part of every summer. Clarence White, in the
first decade of this century, exhibited his work in such places as
Dresden, London, Paris, Turin, Vienna, Boston, New York, Chicago and
Philadelphia, and served on juries of selection for several galleries.
His work appeared frequently in CAMERA WORK, the Photo-Secession's
journal, and was the largest individual contribution to the last of
that group's exhibitions at Buffalo's Albright Art Gallery in 1910.
In 1907 stieglitz recommended Clarence White for the post of Lecturer
in Photography at Teachers College at Columbia University, where White
won acclaim for his photographs of Barnard College's annual "Greek
Games." And in 1914 the Clarence H. White School of Photography opened
on West 144th Street in Manhattan.
Under White's directorship, the school was aimed at maintaining the
values of expressive photography of the Photo-Secessionists, while also
applying them to the newly emerging areas of illustrative and
commercial photography.
The school was enormously successful. Teachers White hired included the
noted photographers Edward Steichen and Paul Strand and also Max Weber
and Paul Anderson who were not photographers but were renowned artists
whose teachings White felt were essential to photography students.
Thus did Clarence White and his staff become mentors to such well-known
photographers as Margaret Bourke White (no relation), Anton Bruehl,
Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, Ira Martin, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph
Steiner, Karl Struss, Doris Ulmann, Margaret Watkins and Carl Schutz.
In 1925 Clarence White took a group of students on a field trip to
Mexico City and while there, in the high altitude, suffered an embolism
and died suddenly, at the age of 54.
His son Clarence Jr., the youngest and only one still at home, was just
19 at the time, but had long had a keen interest in his father's work.
The instructors at the Clarence H. White School of Photography talked
it over with Jane Felix White and Clarence Jr. and decided to keep the
school open and operating, with Jane as the nominal Director, until
they could take Clarence Jr. through every course the school had to
offer. This they did, and Clarence Jr. emerged as the new and permanent
Director of the school, with the most solid and diversified photography
training anyone could have.
Clarence Jr. had real talent as a photographer and became an excellent
one in his own right - but he also turned out to be a natural-born
teacher. In fact, in the role of teacher and Director, he actually
out-shone his famous father, and the school became known as "the place
to study for a photographic career.
In 1934 Clarence Jr. married Ruth Laoeta Royer at The Riverside Church
in Manhattan. Ruth was an honors graduate of Barnard's class of '28 and
had been ensconced in a career as a high school French teacher. But the
attraction of life at the White School was strong, and she soon settled
into the much-needed position of secretary and registrar, taking an
integral part in much of the school's workings.
Things went so well that by 1941 the school was in desperate need of
larger quarters, so the Whites purchased the old Sacks townhouse off
Central Park West. They had just gotten the school all set up in its
new location when the male students, along with many of the
instructors, started being drafted into the military's war effort.
Clarence Jr. tried very hard to interest every branch of the military
in taking over the school to train much-needed war photographers, and
the U.S. Navy almost did. But at the last minute the deal fell through,
and the school was forced to close its doors permanently in 1942.
But Clarence Jr.'s career in photography had only just begun: He joined
the Navy in 1942 (that same year Jane Felix White died) and, because of
his background, was immediately assigned to the Strategic Bombing
Command to train photographers for reconnaissance work. As far as Ruth
knew, he was off frequently to meetings in Washington, plus working on
a photographic training manual, plus logging required flying hours -
all of which was true up to a point, but what he was mainly doing was
going back and forth to Las Al amos, New Mexico and the Pacific,
photographing the atomic bomb tests and training other photographers to
do the same!
This was Clarence White Jr.'s part in the top-secret Manhattan Project.
And he couldn't even tell his wife until the war was over!
By 1947 Clarence and Ruth White were up in Maine, trying to start a new
photography school there. They began by holding classes in their home
by the sea, but soon needed to move into a larger building in the
nearby town of Bath.
The school looked promising at first, but in the long run there simply
weren't enough students to sustain it in that small, tucked-away place,
and in 1949 they returned to the Senior White's home state of Ohio,
where Clarence had been offered the job of making the fledgling
photography department at Ohio University at Athens into a school that
would be second to none. And this is what he did.
They found the right man for the job, and he immediately plunged in.
Ruth became self-employed typing theses for O.U. students, while
studying herself for her master's degree in French, which she obtained
in 1956 and returned to teaching French at Athens High School.
Because of Clarence's work, Ohio University became known as one of the
few really good places to go to study photography. He was eventually
put in charge of the entire Fine Arts Department and, although he had
never actually been to college himself, was given an honorary
Professorship by the University, in recognition of his expertise and
work there.
In 1971 Clarence worked with his former student, Peter C. Bunnell, then
Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to
launch a huge retrospective of the works of Clarence White Sr., the
first one that had been done since 1926.
The show opened in New York and toured the country. It was a tremendous
success, and sparked renewed interest, discovery and appreciation of
this great Photo-Secession artist. Clarence Jr. retired from Ohio
University in 1972 ... to their beloved home, "Popple Beach", on the
rocky coast of Maine, but their retirement was hardly sedentary.
Clarence had hoped to finally be able to pursue more of his own
photography work, but was soon waylaid by his civic interests. He was
voted in as "Selectman" - one of three for Georgetown Island -
and became thoroughly enmeshed in the affairs of the island.
Ruth also took on quite a lot of civic activities, in addition to her
ongoing job as hostess extraordinaire to the many friends, relatives
and former students of both of them, who loved to come and visit. It
didn't hurt that she was also one of the world's best cooks as well!
In February 1978 Clarence and Ruth made a nostalgic visit back to Ohio,
where they were met by many friends and colleagues. A dinner was held
at the University in Athens for them, where it was announced that the
Clarence H. White Jr. Lectureship Fund had been set up in his honor.
He was thrilled and deeply touched and had a wonderful time, but on the
trip home to Maine he became very tired, and soon after his return he
was hospitalized with a heart attack. He died March 1st 1978, at age
71.
Ruth remained at Popple Beach, with her community activities and many
friends, and died from heart failure on March 17th 1991, aged 84.
Apart from many private collections, Clarence White Sr.'s work is
currently on display at the Louvre in Paris, the Royal Photographic
Society in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Banecke
(?) Library at Yale, the Library of Congress in Washington, and the
largest collection is at The Art Museum at Princeton.