Clarence H. White and His World Opens at the Portland Museum of Art

The opening of the exhibition Clarence H. White and His World at the Portland Museum of Art Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895–1925 has opened at its third venue—the Portland Museum of Art, where it is on view through September 16. Don’t miss this last chance to see the exhibition on the East Coast.

Clarence H. White and His World reasserts White’s place in the American canon and, in the process, reshapes and expands our understanding of early twentieth-century American photography.

The review in the Portland Press Herald notes that Clarence H. White’s school for photography, the first to teach it as an art form when it opened in Maine in 1910, “helped establish Maine’s reputation as a destination for fine-art and photographic education.”

Ellen Handy, in a recent review for the College Art Association, made claims reaching far beyond White’s impact in Maine: “This landmark exhibition demonstrates not just the continued vitality of traditional art historical scholarship but also its ability to introduce new critical perspectives. Indefatigably researched and well balanced between its multiple themes and directions, it clearly presents a complicated story about a photographic modernism of synthesis, inclusiveness, and the shared purpose of a wide range of practitioners.”

The first retrospective devoted to the photographer in over a generation, Clarence H. White and His World surveys White’s career from his beginnings in 1895 in Ohio to his death in Mexico in 1925. The exhibition draws on the Clarence H. White Collection at the Princeton University Art Museum and the deep holdings at the Library of Congress as well as loans from other public and private collections.

The exhibition is accompanied by a sumptuous 400-page catalogue edited by Anne McCauley, published by the Princeton University Art Museum, and distributed by Yale University Press.

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Collaboration with Yale Reveals Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Photographic Processes