Rarely did White’s use of Equivalents avoid gimmickry. Whether the allusion is to the body or to the Bible, metaphor failed to enrich his photography. His Biblical references are utterly unconvincing. A photograph called “Burning Bush,” made the year he met Stieglitz, is typical of White in its apocalyptic mood and its flashy use of light and shadow. In this picture, a starburst of light brightens up a scraggly tree and a couple of bushes. It has the look of a special effect in a low-budget movie.
White’s pursuit of the spiritual took him in more esoteric directions as well. For example, he titled a photograph after the most famous Zen koan, “The sound of one hand clapping.” The subject, an Oriental-looking bowl, is as good an answer as any for a riddle that’s not supposed to have an answer, but it really doesn’t do much to encourage a Zen attitude. Zen is about attention, and this dull-gray object against a darker-gray background doesn’t invite attention for long. A seascape titled “Shore Acres, Oregon” does draw attention, but not for the reason White intended. Above the Sturm und Drang of crashing waves, a lone bird picturesquely draws the eyes skyward; a streak of pure-white light divides the heavens from the ruckus of the sea. The whole shebang is clearly meant to inspire awe, but the bird is so small and is photographed at such an ambiguous angle that initially it’s hard to tell whether it’s a gull or only a splotch of grime on the print.
There’s very little warmth or humor in the bulk of White’s work. What there is mostly is pointing. The exhibition includes a small selection of color photographs. The color injects a little oomph into the images, but it also underlines White’s superficial grasp of design. He was hooked on colors that went together or matched: a red faucet handle, say, must have caught his eye because it was on a barrel with a red patch. His propensity for interior-decorating an image led him to take photographs of landscapes that look arranged, rather than found by his camera. His street pictures have some life—he was obviously trying to connect with city energy—but he stiffened the action instead of snapping it, the way a Bill Klein or a Garry Winogrand did. In their photographs, all the different elements cook together; in White’s, the potential hubbub of a street picture has been strained out, so that you can’t miss what he wants you to focus on. He spoon-feeds the viewer. He makes all the discoveries, and the viewer’s job is to respond to what he found, rather than to join him in a process of discovery. Whether the photographs are pointing to nature, pointing to colors, pointing to sex, pointing to God, or pointing to art, they’re didactic. One way to avoid pedagogy is to be human, to show doubt by acknowledging that life brings more questions than answers. But to do that requires an honest look at oneself—exactly what White felt he couldn’t afford in his public pictures. This fear of exposure is painfully clear in the letters of his that are reprinted in Bunnell’s book.
What is striking in these letters is the mysterious absence of any mention of love or romance—that whole department. These letters were written to the people he felt closest to, and they’re full of his ideas about work, photography, and spiritual matters. Yet there’s only one person, Isabel Kane Bradley, in whom he confides any emotions or experiences having to do with his hom*osexuality. For more about White’s personal life, one has to go to his poems and to his private journal, which carries the name “Memorable Fancies.” (Some of this material is included in the book.) In “Memorable Fancies,” White attempted to get to the bottom of what made him tick, of what made him ashamed: his entries reveal that he was trying to understand the relationship between his personality and the stigma of hom*osexuality. A comment he wrote on March 10, 1960, reads, “I have often said that for anyone who likes self pity—hom*osexuality is a grand source... I recall from [my work in] Sequence 13 the statement ‘By a law of yourself you are condemned to live in fear of those that will love you.’ What LAW? What and why Law?”
Too bad White didn’t harness this ability to dig below the surface when he was actually making photographs. At “The Eye That Shapes” you can see the effect of imposed rules and formulas on an artist’s work. You can see how silly a subject can get if it can’t be expressed directly. You can watch what happens as life is edited out. And in the book you can read how White advised others to stick to propriety. A letter written in 1962 to an unidentified photographer who had sent his sexually revelatory work to White indicates just how slavish he was to a recipe of what should and shouldn’t go into art. “These prints outline for me a rather tragic story of a man’s life,” White wrote. “Your photographs are still mirrors of yourself. In other words your images are raw, the emotions naked. To present these to others they need appropriate clothes. These are private images not public ones.”
White recognized that the other photographer had created images that were “very real” and very affecting, yet White was telling him to cover up the elements that conveyed such meaning. White’s insistence that the photographer dress up his story to enable it to pass as a reflection of Mankind was presented in the name of the standard notion that art should be universalized—the concept that makes White’s own photography so hollow. Despite all his talk of mirrors, he didn’t seem to understand that there can be no such thing as common experience if there are no specific selves to reflect it.
Looking at much of White’s photography is like listening to a sermon from someone who is unable to communicate to you because he doesn’t acknowledge what life is really like. White’s diaries and his letters to Bradley suggest that he knew about the struggle to have faith, to find intimacy, to accept himself, and to be accepted by others, but you cannot tell it from the bulk of his work. He squeezed conflict from his art, leaving it mechanical. Bunnell’s substructure in “The Eye That Shapes” reinforces the sermonizing quality that so many of White’s pictures have. Pompous titles introduced each section at the Modern—“Possession,” “Observation,” and “Revelation”—and the final portion of the show gave us a dose of White’s preachiest photographs of crosses, cross-forms, and beams of light.
White’s isn’t the only faith on view in “The Eye That Shapes.” Bunnell’s faith in White is almost palpable in this carefully plotted production. I wasn’t at the lecture Bunnell gave at the Modern in conjunction with the opening of the show, but I heard a tape of it later. In it you can hear his emotion and his devotion to White. His intention is obviously to provide such a wide overview of White’s biography and the development of his pictorial vocabulary that the viewer can come away with an understanding of the man and a method of reading White’s codes and substitutional devices. He succeeds—and, as a result, viewers can understand more easily what went wrong.
White is not unusual in having two bodies of work—the pictures he showed to the world and those he didn’t. But although the hidden pictures have been referred to as private imagery, they were actually treated as secret imagery—and there’s a big difference between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is a choice; it’s about living your life the way you want to. Secrecy is usually a form of protection, but the safety it affords has the same relationship to freedom as being locked in an isolation chamber. Many of White’s photographs show what it’s like to be inside that room. They’re like messages sent by someone trapped, who has to disguise or code what is being transmitted so that it gets through; once you break White’s codes, you simply apply them where appropriate. The rest of the time you’re seeing standard pictures within standardized genres, be they religion, landscape, architecture, or abstraction. Often the results are perfectly fine, but “fine” doesn’t have much to do with being moved or captured by pictures.
It can’t be assumed that if White had been able to express himself more openly he would have been a more imaginative photographer. Even with those early nudes, some preconceived notion of artistic presentation—of lighting or pose or prop—tends to drain the images of life. But those are the photographs of a young artist looking for a style, a way to give his pictures his own stamp; their self-consciousness is typical of a beginner’s work. Who knows what he could have done if he hadn’t been so deeply involved with developing covert and acceptable ways to communicate his experience?
There are early pictures by White—especially the intimate ones of people—that have a real pictorial “voice.” “Ernest Stones and Robert Bright” is a gem, made all the more precious because you know that these two men couldn’t show their feelings for each other out in the world. And the “Saint Anthony Is Mirrors” sequence is rich enough to hint at the possibility that if White had directly approached what he was struggling with in his life he might have produced vital work. These photographs expose the source of White’s conflict between his religious beliefs and his desires. You can’t unravel the two subjects in these images; they are knotted together here the way they were in White’s mind. It is the tension one feels between them that gives the photographs force. When there is no figure in his spiritual work, the pictures lose passion and become hokey and stripped flat; the voice gets lost. The photograph that sums it all up is a self-portrait he made in 1957. It’s completely abstract, a white surface with black streaks. You can’t have a more blatant image than this of a missing person—or an emptier use of abstraction.
White wasn’t the kind of artist who did great work either despite or because of taboos. We like to remember those individuals who broke through the social and moral codes of their day, or who found ingenious ways around them. However, there aren’t many with Genet’s sense of nothing to lose, or with Proust’s scope. What about those who are crippled, rather than inspired, by repression? Isn’t it likely that White’s defensive reflexes put so many brakes on his imagination that his picture-making froze?
Today, the images that White had to keep locked up cause no outrage. When his exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art last spring, it drew some coverage but not much excitement. Although it will be seen in many distinguished institutions, it will not go to Washington. The show was packed in crates all summer, because it wasn’t scheduled for an appearance until September, when it opened at the Oregon Art Institute, in Portland. When the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, cancelled Robert Mapplethorpe’s show, it filled the space with a show that had been scheduled for the fall, but actually White would have been a cleverer solution. In the White exhibition the Corcoran would have got the same basic subjects that are represented in the Mapplethorpe show—nature, portraits, and male nudes—plus some extras, such as landscapes and street pictures. It would not have received any photographs comparable in shock value to Mapplethorpe’s sex pictures, yet it would still have had hom*osexuality as a theme, so no one could have accused it of being hom*ophobic. There are other touchy issues that the Corcoran could have avoided by using White as Mapplethorpe’s understudy, such as who’s footing the bill. Although government money helps keep the doors of almost every art institution in America open, the White show itself comes courtesy of Merrill Lynch & Company. Backed by big business, the White package can’t be accused of using taxpayers’ money to support monkey business.
White’s career is the well-behaved precursor of Mapplethorpe’s. White is not so loaded, because he fits a stereotype that many people are comfortable with—the hom*osexual artist who feels rotten about his sexuality and agrees not to thrust it in people’s faces. White did what Mapplethorpe wouldn’t do: he censored himself. Mapplethorpe left the censoring to others, and the Corcoran obliged. It would have none of Mapplethorpe’s show rather than some of it, the Corcoran announced, explaining that it did not want to have to censor parts of it. But no one had asked it to. It claimed that it wanted to keep the heat off the National Endowment for the Arts for giving a grant to the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the institution that originated “The Perfect Moment.” With help like that, the N.E.A. doesn’t need enemies—nor do any of the institutions that have shown Mapplethorpe’s work and could be tagged as irresponsible because of the Corcoran’s action.
Minor White, “Untitled” (1947).
Just like White, Mapplethorpe was ambitious, but he was not a follower of systems. He worked with what he saw around him and took cues from his own responses. You could write his biography on the basis of his photographs, without needing any secondary material, so many of the people he was involved with are right there in the pictures. And you can follow Mapplethorpe’s sexual history through his work. There are early cutouts from p*rnography magazines. Then there are the portraits of Patti Smith, the S & M pictures, Sam Wagstaff, the men who followed—the story of his life. Like White, Mapplethorpe, a Catholic, often made work that included the iconography of the Cross. Unlike White, Mapplethorpe leaped on the sex taboo in art as though it were the last frontier to explore. Instead of circling around hom*osexuality, Mapplethorpe made it an unavoidable subject for anyone looking at or talking about his pictures. Instead of being afraid that hom*osexuality would ruin his career, Mapplethorpe used it to forward his reputation. Instead of photographing rocks to suggest sex, Mapplethorpe made pictures of men having sex. But that does not mean that Mapplethorpe wasn’t initially as freaked out as the next man about being a hom*osexual. He, too, had to deal with the question “What am I?” Much of the time, he used his work to try to answer that question. His self-portraits are an inventory of identities: himself as a woman, as a gangster, as a devilish imp, as a gentleman, as a toughie, as nothing special.
He was a photographer who took advantage of all the taboos and mysteries surrounding sex and hom*osexuality. They were his keys to doing something that would be noticed. Of course, the subject matter of his photographs wasn’t new; what was different was that he was presenting explicit images that he wanted to show aboveground, not underground. The content of his most controversial work has an informational usefulness, too. These pictures provide views of sexual activities that are a puzzle to many people. He makes up for the sex education most of us didn’t get. Because he broke through the usual secrecy that surrounds hom*osexuality, hom*osexuality became the frame through which his photographs are seen. But many of his pictures—including many that are sexual—have nothing in them that makes them inherently about hom*osexuality. A man with his penis hanging out of his fly—which is what we see in Mapplethorpe’s wryest image of all—is a joke on the way everything that has to do with sex is supposed to be zipped up. Many of his “naughty” photographs are like this one, in which Mapplethorpe was having fun shocking. Others are displays of his virtuosity with form. What better way to get people to look at your ability to compose photographs that are technically and formally sophisticated than to show off with a shape—a penis, a bottom, a nipple, a belly button—that you know has box-office draw? So many photographers who care about composition forget about our boredom, or maybe don’t respect it; they give us formally clever pictures, and we yawn. Mapplethorpe wanted to grab our attention, and he did, with that which had grabbed his own attention.
