Museum Announces Award of Two 2019 Minor White Archive Research Grants

The Museum has announced the award of two 2019 Minor White Archive Research Grants by the Minor White Project Committee. These awards of up to $4,000 are intended to help defray costs incurred by scholars traveling to and residing in Princeton while conducting research using the Minor White Archive—the most important collection of primary source material by and about the artist—which includes over 6,000 finished prints, artist’s proof cards, and bibliographic history, as well as correspondence, personal papers, and some 5,000 prints made by students and friends of the photographer.

Grant recipients for 2019 Josh Ellenbogen and Adam Jolles are undertaking a collaborative project, Minor White and the Practice of Photo-Criticism. They will examine White’s aspirations to establish photo-criticism as a genre of writing while editor-in-chief at Aperture magazine, exploring the relationships between the editorial program White instituted at the magazine and the contemporaneous evolution of photo-curation. Adam Jolles is associate professor in the Department of Art History at Florida State University and the author of The Curatorial Avant-Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–1941. Josh Ellenbogen is associate professor in art history at the University of Pittsburgh. His book, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: Bertillon, Galton, Marey, maps deployments of photography in scientific investigation in the late nineteenth century. The research of these scholars at the Archive will be incorporated into an upcoming co-authored book on the institutional history of photography in the United States.

Recipient for 2019 Catherine Barth, doctoral candidate in art history at Emory University, will focus on White’s advocacy for the work of photographer Frederick Sommer, whose dense images combining painting, drawing, photography, and collage were featured by White in the pages of Aperture. Her dissertation, “Frederick Sommer: At the Limits of Avant-Garde Philosophy,” considers how the writings in Aperture speak to the controversy that Sommers’s images provoked as a result of their challenge to the conventional ideals of clarity and legibility—traditionally associated with the camera. Taken together, the work of these three scholars will mine the rich and varied contents of the Minor White Archive, providing insight into White’s development of a singularly modern vision that challenged the definition of photography as a documentary medium and advocated for the photograph’s potential to embody multiple meanings, some personal and allusive.

White’s Archive entered the collections of the Museum in 1976, under the guidance of professor and curator Peter C. Bunnell, a former student of the photographer. During his tenure, Bunnell’s work with the Archive’s contents culminated in a major exhibition, Minor White: The Eye That Shapes (1989), first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition traveled to five other venues before finishing its tour at the Princeton University Art Museum. Minor White: The Eye That Shapes interpreted White’s photographic achievements in relation to major photographers in the generations before him, including Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Paul Strand. With the generous support of a 2014 Museums for America Collections Stewardship grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Museum recently completed a two-year digitization and cataloguing project that has provided online access—on the  Minor White Archive website—to more than 6,000 photographsfor the first time.

 Previous Minor White Archive grant recipients include Todd Cronan, associate professor of art history at Emory University (2018); Ian Bourland, assistant professor of art history at Georgetown University (2017); and Brendan Fay, assistant professor in the School of Art and Design at Eastern Michigan University (2016).