SILVER MOUNTAIN FOUNDATION INCORPORATING APERTURE and the PAUL STRAND ARCHIVE AND LIBRARY ANNOUNCES A WORK-STUDY PROGRAM
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SILVER MOUNTAIN FOUNDATION: A public foundation providing for an extended program in photography and the visual arts through Aperture, the Paul Strand Archive and Library, Photogravure Workshop, and the Burden Gallery at 20 East 23rd Street.
THE COMMUNITY OF INTEREST, the circle of intense, creative commitment that Minor White helped sustain and that sustained him during his life-time, is suggested in this issue of Aperture dedicated to the multiple spheres of his influence.
As this issue of Aperture was at the printer, we learned the news of Ansel Adams's death at the age of eighty-two. A founder of Aperture, Ansel Adams supported and passionately promoted the photography community throughout his lifetime.
"To Imply, and Then to Amplify"— Homage to Art Sinsabaugh, 1924— 1983
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JONATHAN WILLIAMS
ARTHUR READER SINSABAUGH was an irascible, wacko, Martini-gulping Dutchman—his forebear Jan Vermeer had equally crazy taste in red socks—| whose personal habits seemed to have little connection with his austere and superbly composed images of the landscape world.
Among the burdens of fame is the acquisition of another identity—the public figure. Modeled from the unfamous original, the persona of the public figure is often a caricature of the original. As in a caricaturist's sketch, some features are enlarged or distorted and others ignored.
I first met Garry Winogrand in January 1966 at the old Underground Gallery on Tenth Street in Manhattan. Although we exchanged just a few words at the time, I can recall the meeting because Winogrand seemed embarrassed when I told him how excited I had been to see a couple of his photographs in a museum exhibition earlier that day.
What may be the deepest meanings of the images shown are not always easily recognizable at first glance. They emerge with increasing clarity only as we experience them. They take on a living reality to the degree that we are able to penetrate the mask that hides us from ourselves.
THE YEARS IN LA GRANDE, Oregon, were very important to Minor's whole perspective and life. It was the first time to my knowledge that he had been to the West. La Grande was a town of about eight thousand people, in the middle of nowhere and about fifty miles from the next town.
CONTEMPLATION, then, in the most general sense is a power which we may—and often must—apply to the perception, not only of Divine Reality, but of anything. It is a mental attitude under which all things give up to us the secret of their life. All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.
IN HIS WORK with the students in his illustration class at Rochester Institute of Technology, and in his workshops which had become annual affairs in Oregon, Minor continued to develop the ideas implicit in the Zen relationship (suggested in Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery or in the writings of Chuang Tsu, in the rich, evocative source of the I Ching, which both he and Walter Chappell had consulted for years, and now in the new relationship with the Gurdjieff workshop group in Rochester.
THE MAIN IMPORTANCE of Minor lies not in that he was a friend of this or that individual's, nor that he studied one or another esoteric philosophy, nor even that he wrote of such things, but in that he made some classically great photographs. He rendered a service to later generations of photographers by enlarging on the mystique of seeing that Stieglitz first expressed, but Minor's writings on the subject seem blurred in a way that his photographs are not: a little amateurish, a little enthusiastic, too sure of the abstract, oddly personal and idiosyncratic although based in a general way on various cohesive bodies of thought and practice.
MINOR DISCUSSED world problems infrequently. I did talk with him about how I thought the life at the house in Arlington was extraordinary because it seemed almost grotesquely sheltered. It seemed so clean, white walled, and peaceful, like a promise of a better world.
ANSEL ADAMS's photographs are currently on view at the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego, in a major retrospective sponsored by Friends of Photography. ROBERT ADAMS recently completed Our Lives and Our Children: Photographs Taken near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, published by Aperture.
Many people have generously contributed their time and talents to the creation of this special tribute to Minor White. We are especially grateful to William Parker, R. H. Cravens, Christopher Cox, and Lauren Shakely for editorial contributions in the early stages of the project.