Photography as a Way of Life: From Archive to Exhibition

In summer 1964 the photographer Minor White was traveling across the western United States, living and working out of a camper van. It had become an annual tradition. During this phase of his career, when he was in his fifties, White devoted his summers to extended road trips. The trips led him from his home in Rochester, New York—where he edited Aperture magazine and taught photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology—to Denver, Portland, San Francisco, and other locations where he taught intensive short-term photography workshops. The workshops helped White build personal connections with the growing audience for his work; they also helped fund his travels. The road trips, in turn, offered vital opportunities to make new photographs. 

Loaded with photography equipment and leaving just enough space for White and a travel companion to sleep inside, White’s van was the rolling headquarters of these adventures in teaching and art making. Like a family member on vacation, the van itself sometimes appears in White’s pictures. Sifting through the 35mm color slides that White produced during these trips, one finds the vehicle in forests and arid valleys, on hilltops and below mesas. In the exhibition Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan, visitors will discover several of these images among a wider selection of White’s color outtakes from life on the road—glimpses into the depth of the Princeton University Art Museum’s Minor White Archive. 

This exhibition grows out of the unique resources of White’s archive at Princeton, one of the cornerstones of the Museum’s long-standing commitment to the medium of photography. Photography as a Way of Life draws together the careers of three legendary photographers: White and his contemporaries Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, all of whom are richly represented in the Museum’s photography collections. White, Siskind, and Callahan were major artists with a shared interest in abstraction and personal expression; they were also icons among the first generation of college-level photography teachers in the United States. As they found teaching opportunities and used those opportunities to support their ambitions as artists, they established model careers for generations of photographers to follow. 

We have been working toward this exhibition for ten years, but one of the earliest and easiest decisions was to make White, Siskind, and Callahan the main characters in its story. I was honored to receive the inaugural Minor White Research Fellowship in 2016; many of my initial conversations with Katherine Bussard, the Museum’s Peter C. Bunnell Senior Curator of Photography, grew out of the discoveries enabled by that grant. My deep immersion in the archive allowed me to see, with new clarity, how Siskind and Callahan were central to White’s vision of the field of photography, even as White’s ideas about art and teaching differed from theirs in significant ways. We began to craft an exhibition that would illuminate the connections and differences among the three photographers—and, in the process, demonstrate how they shaped the evolving field from the 1940s into the 1970s.

The exhibition’s narrative and many of its highlight moments reflect the stories and ideas found in White’s correspondence, diaries, teaching notes, unpublished writings, and photographic materials. For example, I saw opportunities to bring new attention to White’s color photography, which was important to his thinking as well as to his relationship with students and other audiences in the 1960s and 1970s.

Prior to the 1970s, photographers had limited options for printing color, as it didn’t lend itself to the same kinds of control and fine craftsmanship available with black-and-white photographic printing. Despite these limitations, White embraced 35mm color slides in the 1960s. (Callahan had done the same since the 1940s; his work in color, better known than White’s, is also well represented in the exhibition.) White liked the way that shooting color slides shifted his attention away from careful planning toward rapid seeing. As slides returned in boxes after processing, White was provoked by the way they accumulated in large numbers, inviting him to shuffle them into new combinations like a deck of cards. He embraced slide projection as a way of sharing color images with viewers, and he came to think of color as a medium for live audiences. 

White’s most significant project in this mode was a slide projection titled Slow Dance, a sequence of color images shown side by side using two slide projectors. To assemble the sequence, White selected slides from his summer road trips. The images often show natural subjects seen at close range—close-up details and textures predominate, along with a strong sense of abstraction. The exact set of slides varied over time, changing year by year or possibly from performance to performance. From 1966 into the 1970s, White performed evolving versions of Slow Dance, sharing it with his university students, workshop participants, and other public audiences. White improvised the timing of his projection-performances, silently watching his audience’s reactions and pacing the flow of images accordingly.

Image credit

Photo: Jeffrey Evans

In Photography as a Way of Life, visitors will encounter a digital projection that reconstructs one version of Slow Dance from a set of slides now found in White’s archive. The sequence of fifty slide pairs unfolds over the course of nearly twenty minutes. The experience takes time, which was very much White’s point. Slow Dance was, among other things, an exercise in sustained concentration and focused awareness. White wanted viewers to reflect upon their own reactions to images and to feel the reactions of others. He wanted to lead groups, collectively, toward what he termed “awakening.” The archive sheds new light on White’s use of color and the ways he merged his art and teaching in his later years; in all his activities, he aimed to awaken audiences to the possibility of intensified experience. This was one significant way in which White differed from Siskind and Callahan, with effects on the professional field surrounding all three influential photographers.  

As the guest curator of the exhibition, I have delighted in my years of collaboration and partnership with the extraordinary teams here at the Museum. As we developed a clear vision and timeline for Photography as a Way of Life between 2019 and 2021, the Museum was also embarking on an unprecedented building project. Ultimately those timelines converged in fortuitous ways: This inaugural year of the new Museum coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of White’s passing in 1976. It provides an opportunity to reflect anew on the legacy of White’s bequest; to celebrate decades of stewardship and care provided by the late Peter C. Bunnell, the legendary Princeton curator, professor, and Museum director; and to appreciate the ongoing value of the Minor White Archive for the future. 

From that perspective, I have been thrilled by the opportunity to work with Princeton’s growing photography collections in real time. During the development of the exhibition, for example, the Museum made remarkable new acquisitions of work by Baldwin Lee, Adger Cowans, and Ming Smith. Lee was a student of White’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cowans and Smith were members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a landmark group of Black photographers in New York City who sought out connections with Aperture magazine during White’s years as editor. In Photography as the Way of Life these new acquisitions strike up deep conversations with White’s handmade mock-up for the first issue of Aperture and other highlights, such as previously unpublished portraits and book manuscripts—conversations that could unfold only from the Minor White Archive.

Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan is on view through September 7, 2026. 

The exhibition will travel to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (October 9, 2026–February 7, 2027); the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (March 13–July 31, 2027); and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (August 28, 2027–January 9, 2028).

The exhibition is made possible by leadership support from Jim McKinney and the late Valerie McKinney with generous support from Anne Robinson Woods and Sandy and Robin Stuart. Additional support is provided by Black Dog Private Foundation; the Curtis W. McGraw Foundation; the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund; the Peter C. Bunnell Photography Fund; Princeton University’s Department of Art & Archaeology, Effron Center for the Study of America, and Humanities Council; Kathryn Richardson and family; and contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund. The accompanying publication is made possible in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund; the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University; Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund; and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.