From: Keith Gerling (kgerling@ameritech.net)
Date: 05/15/01-08:16:49 AM Z
I thank you for these comments, for they ideally serve to delineate the
differences between the (traditional) Eastern and Western approaches to art
and life. I've read much of what Minor White had to say, and I agree that
his true talents lie in photography, not the printed word. But any student
of Zen, or for that matter, a student of Eastern philosophy in general will
find Minor White's writing to be perfectly understandable. No, it is not
rooted in Western logic, and thus it stands, for good or bad, out of range
of our Western analysis. One can not "defend" the Zen approach, at least
*I* cannot in a short, off-topic e-mail response, but I can certainly say
that much of what is written in explanation or defense of Zen is not easily
"parsed". "The sound of one hand clapping". Parse that.
"Octave of Prayer" changed my life. As an impressionable student, and an
aspiring painter, I discovered the catalog to this exhibition in 1972 and
decided at that time to try using a camera for personal expression. While
my photographic work has departed from this approach, I still often refer to
these works for inspiration.
-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Seigel [mailto:jseigel@panix.com]
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 11:20 PM
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Subject: Re: "Become a camera"
On Mon, 14 May 2001, Darryl Baird wrote:
> As Minor saw the spiritual aspects in all things, I doubt this
> interpretation would withstand close scrutiny....
I think Darryl makes the point very tactfully. And there's an important
other point -- the quality of a photographer's photographs is entirely
unrelated to the quality of his/her, um, prose.
Minor White was a wonderful photographer, and also editor for some years
of Aperture, in its golden age (or what I think in retrospect is
considered its golden age.... I was somewhere else at the time). However,
if you try to parse his WRITING, mystico spirituoso religico abstrusico,
it comes out like the famous kikki bird, or like peeling an onion, you go
round & round & in the end, simply onion air.
P-F # 5 quoted A. D. Coleman (p. 24) TYPICALLY over the top & HYSTERICALLY
out-of-proportion, but in 1973 so riled up at some major Minor spiritual
effluvia he said White's "Octave of Prayer" was an "insidious insult to
all photographers... proto-totalitarian... self-serving claptrap....
dangerous...auto-deification.. and monumental abuse of power," then closed
with, "the time has come for White to be folded up and neatly and
carefully put away before he gets a chance to hurt himself or anybody
else." (Needless to say, worse than M W at his wiggiest.)
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