White and Sepuya
I’m working on a little gay photo project and bought a Minor White book to think through it.
Minor White was a gay photographer, who, famously, edited and maintained Aperture Magazine. He’s dead now. His parents found out that he was gay (I think in 1927?), he moved out, then never talked about his sexuality with them. He launched a camera club at the YMCA (this might be ten years later). Then began teaching. His Catholic friend converted him. He joined the army (yesterday, at a gay bar with a guy who used to be a marine: “there are so many things that these straight people did with each other that were gayer than I’d ever be comfortable with!”). He took pictures of soldier friends (the picture that the book features is definitely a gay man). He wrote poems. And then the war ended, and some other things happened (like he lost and regained his motivation to take photographs, he learned how to expose properly when he was 38, and began teaching). He was friends with Ansel Adams, and took wonderful landscape photos. And then, here we go: here’s the start of his trouble. Buckle up.
Never before released, except in this book I have in front of me (which was published ten years ago…), White created a “self-reflective” photo sequence. He called it, The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors. And in it: male, full-frontal nudes. The dick pics of the 1940s. By the way: that was illegal! No exhibiting or publishing full-frontal male nudes, which, apparently, would’ve outed White from the closet too. He would have been fired. His career would have been ruined. High stakes dick pics! So he put the work in a tiny little book, which the author of this book’s introduction claims is full of “various emotional states, from anguish to ecstasy.” Classic gay. But maybe not so contemporary gay.
I write this little thing slightly hungover from post-gay-kickball festivities at a local gay bar, known to pour strong, cheap drinks. It is 2024. When I ask my gay friends what counts as a gay photo, none of them think that full-frontal male nudity automatically qualifies a portrait as gay.
White continued. He published Song Without Words, which features phallic landscapes (and not-phallic landscapes) mixed with male portraits. And he publishes another sequence, Fourth Sequence, expressing his sort-of repressed gay desire even more. Here, it seems like “gay” or “erotic,” takes place just as much in his landscape photography (a Bay Area version of Brokeback Mountain’s lonesome, pastoral moodiness) as in his repetitive, almost obsessive sequences of male nudes.
And at the time, White “grew disenchanted” with the Catholic church. Being gay will do that to you! And he was “in love” with a woman, except hated himself for not being able to get it up in the bedroom. He literally wondered whether life was worth living at all. The obvious response to this sort of feeling is to trade your 4x5 camera for a little 35mm rangefinder and run around taking street photography, switching your approach to photography from a deliberate, slow medium to an investigative, on-the-fly one. And then he fell in love.
Not with a woman this time: Minor White fell for a dancer, who got him into the Evelyn Underhill brand of Christian Mysticism. I think my gay priest suggested her one time too. And so, inspired again, White took photos, probably giggling to himself, saying “people will think this is inspired by the love of God…but it’s also inspired by my love for the flesh.” The work was called Sequence II: The Young Man as a Mystic, and I can’t help but think of this strange relationship between landscape photography, homoeroticism, and mysticism—which Minor White seems to exhibit pretty blatantly.
In 2024, some of my friends keep track of our closeted gay friends. Not that we know for sure, but there are signs: some dig deeply into Christianity. Others might also drop off the grid into nature. I feel like I’ve done both; many of my friends still think of me as primarily a “landscape” photographer, from a time when I was closeted, and probably the most “productive” photographically. And I think Minor White might also demonstrate this correspondence between a troubled sexuality, landscapes, and “spirituality,” in a way that never resolves. And if I ask my gay friends what counts as a gay photo in 2024, it would need to, unlike White’s work (which I might critique because so much of it is relatable), be out and not so repressed; even if that means literalizing an experience that often hides behind metaphor (for White, metaphorized into aesthetics, into religion, into landscapes...).
White began to study “Eastern” philosophy and religion. He wanted his photography to be mystical. He began a residency program that seemed like a hermitage for photography. He wrote about the Tao of photography. He seems to have fully consumed the Kool-Aid of photography, visible in his work The Sound of One Hand. It’s so abstract; it’s so balanced; it’s so contemplative; and then he had a little gay affair that did not end so well!
He wrote, not for the first nor last time, in his journal, “for anyone who likes self pity—homosexuality is a grand source.” He took pictures of landscapes in response to this gay affair that feel full of angst. And it’s difficult to separate his approach to photography, his approach to spirituality, and his turbulent love life. He called the work Steely the Barb of Infinity, in an effort to communicate the insignificance of the individual in the face of the infinite. In my mind, that’s a dramatic way to deal with a rocky, closeted gay affair. Dear Minor White: you’re not talking to the infinite; you’re just insignificant in the face of your lover (a lover who sent White a poem, after it seems like White had processed his feelings, announcing his marriage to a woman—very Call Me By Your Name).
And then, off to another little gay affair for Minor White, with Bill LaRue, and then Drid Williams. Road trips with both of them; environmental portraits with both of them, in a sequence with images so jagged they almost look like collages. His sequences of men correspond with what he says about his love for men, in a letter to Edmund Teske (who sent him images, apparently homoerotically-coded, to publish in Aperture): “a tragic story of a man’s life…inner conflict that is neither resolved by solution or by death. Not a pleasant story…” And in his homophobic closeted gesture, White takes one of Teske’s male nudes and crops the “nude” out of it to “universalize” it. Homophobic little censorship. What a stupid thing to do.
Finally, it should come as no surprise that White shrugged his apathetic, spiritual, apolitical little shoulders when one of his colleagues was outed and then fired. That’s so Zen of him to do. And then he died, and the author notes that one of White’s last photographs is “a testament to the enduring power of White’s vision and a manifestation of his transcendent spirit.”
It should be clear by now that I’m not so happy with Minor White. Although he’s a great photographer, and also a product of his time, he presents landscape and spiritual approaches to photography in tension with a repressed, self-hating approach to his sexuality. Except for one moment of bliss, combining his love for the divine with a love with a dancer, his photographs are expressions built on a homophobic self in a homophobic society. And while a modernist might praise White’s art for being expressive, we live in 2024: White’s expression corresponds to something politically regressive. A gay male photography in the United States in 2024 must be different. A gay male photography cannot be closeted.
The other day, I spent the morning at the Getty, which is where I bought Minor White’s book, along with one by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Sepuya is a black, queer photographer. And when I shoot portraits of gay men, I bring Sepuya’s images to show them, because they’re ambiguous, fragmented, and help the session break into something more open-ended.
According to Sepuya, most of his portraits rely on desire. For him, it is important that he photographs friends, or people who could be potential lovers. So he shoots queer bodies.
In the Spring, 2024 edition of Butt Magazine, which is a queer zine, Sepuya releases “unreleased” images. They were censored by him, anticipating censorship by others. “At a recent show, I had difficulty with my gallerist insisting that a hard-on couldn’t be in the initial gallery sightlines—it’s threatening. Collectors often comb through images to make sure there’s no nudity. But I’ve gotten over that. Sort of.” And, in this edition of Butt Magazine, Sepuya gives us images of guys, where “horniness” was the foundation of the images. For collectors, horniness is too “threatening,” although this is the territory where he feels like he’s putting his sexuality into his art. By dealing with his sexuality, in a way he calls “vulnerable,” Sepuya enters the very-queer territory between porn and art.
There’s nothing so deep about it. Seupya’s self-censorship for the art world is, at the very least, interesting. And Minor White’s whole closeted situation, making beautiful landscape prints that seem fueled by sexual repression and longing, seems interesting to me too.
For all of this, I wonder about the desexualization of queerness. I wonder about the desexualization and abstraction of a sexual orientation. That gap where sexuality becomes identity. If photography is a medium of representation, then I guess I wonder what is being represented. Identity like a castrated queerness; a contemporary queerness analogized to the biblical eunuch. I’m not so sure what to make of it.