page_title: Clarence Hudson White
section_title: 1906-1913: New York and professionalism
hierarchical_section_title: Clarence Hudson White / Life / 1906-1913: New York and professionalism
caption_attribution_description: English: The Bubble
context_page_description: Clarence Hudson White was an American photographer, teacher and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. He grew up in small towns in Ohio, where his primary influences were his family and the social life of rural America. After visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he took up photography. Although he was completely self-taught in the medium, within a few years he was internationally known for his pictorial photographs that captured the spirit and sentimentality of America in the early twentieth century.
  As he became well known for his images, White was sought out by other photographers who often traveled to Ohio to learn from him. He became friends with Alfred Stieglitz and helped advance the cause of photography as a true art form. In 1906 White and his family moved to New York City in order to be closer to Stieglitz and his circle and to further promote his own work. While there he became interested in teaching photography and in 1914 he established the Clarence H. White School of Photography, the first educational institution in America to teach photography as art.
context_section_description: Sometime in early 1906 White decided to leave Newark and move to New York City. Both his wife and he had become close friends with the East Coast photographers with whom he had been showing his work, including Stieglitz, Day, Käsebier, Steichen and Eugene, and these extended family and artistic connections had supplanted the small group of like-minded friends the Whites had in Newark. At the center of these connections was Stieglitz, who had recently created "the heady siren of the Photo-Secession and the Little Galleries."
  As they were getting ready to move Mrs. White learned she was pregnant, and as the early months were difficult for her it was decided that she would remain in Newark until after the baby was born. In September White moved to New York with his two sons and his widowed mother, who cared for the boys until their mother arrived. Their third son, Clarence Hudson White, Jr., was born in January, 1907. Due to the difficulty of the pregnancy Mrs. White remained in Newark until June of that year.
  The year 1907 was one of the most important in White's career. Arthur Wesley Dow, who was a very influential painter, photographer and teacher, then chaired the art department at Columbia University. Dow, who had known White for at least five years, asked White to become a part-time lecturer in art photography at Teachers College, which was part of Columbia. This was a strong testimony to the international recognition of White's artistry, since White himself had no education beyond high school and he had never had any training in art of any kind. He soon found himself in love with his new profession, which finally afforded him a modest but steady income while relieving him of any detail of managing a business (White was notoriously lax in billing and collecting from clients).
  During this same year White and Stieglitz undertook an artistic experiment in which they jointly created a series of photographs of two models, Mabel Cramer and another known only as Miss Thompson. Stieglitz offered suggestions about posing the models, White focused the camera, and one or the other of them would snap the shutter. White also developed the negatives and printed the photographs. One of the intentions of the experiment was to try a variety of printing techniques and papers, including platinum, gelatin silver and gum bichromate prints. On a few signed of the prints they signed with a monogram that combined both of their initials. During this collaboration, White learned the Autochrome color process from Stieglitz, who had just returned from Europe with this technical knowledge. White and Stieglitz jointly created at least one Autochrome during this time, which they exhibited later in the year.
  In 1908 Stieglitz continued to show his admiration for White by devoting an entire issue of Camera Work to him and 16 of his photographs. It was only the third time Stieglitz had singled out an individual photographer for this honor (the others were Steichen and Coburn).
  White was so well received as a teacher at Columbia that in 1908 he was appointed as an instructor at what was then called the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science (now known as the Brooklyn Museum). He maintained this position for the next 13 years, even while working at his own school and teaching independent workshops.
  While visiting Day in Maine in 1910 White found a small, run-down cabin near Day's property, and he convinced the owner to sell it to him for almost nothing. He then purchased a piece of property nearby and had the cabin moved to his new land. After the cabin was rebuilt and enlarged, White established the Seguinland School of Photography on the site. Named after a nearby hotel, Seguinland was the first independent school of photography in America. White asked his friend Max Weber to teach with him, and his colleagues Day and later Käsebier critiqued student work at the end of each summer session. Attracted by White's reputation and by the modest tuition costs, the first students to the school came from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles,
caption: "The Bubble", 1898
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