Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan Article

Opening on April 19, 2026, the exhibition Photography as a Way of Life traces the intertwined careers of Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan, who carved out a new role for photographers and their art in the decades after World War II. White, Siskind, and Callahan came to photography from different backgrounds and visual traditions, but they converged on similar styles and a shared professional identity. Inclined toward abstraction and personally expressive images, the three artists were icons among the first generation of college-level photography teachers; they transformed the ways photography was taught, practiced, shown, and understood, creating a lasting impact that reached far beyond their classrooms and workshops. Photography as a Way of Life shows how these influential teachers and theorists reimagined the medium as a livelihood and a life’s work.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, amid thriving markets for snapshots and photojournalism, photography emerged as a field of study in higher education. The process began in smaller colleges of art and design, and throughout their own teaching careers White, Siskind, and Callahan found employment in places that called themselves “schools” and “institutes.” But within a generation, the models of photographic education they developed—on the fly during the GI Bill years of the 1940s and with further revision and codification in the 1950s—had touched nearly every corner of higher education in the United States, often through the efforts of their students. While White, Siskind, and Callahan found critical success with books and solo exhibitions, and their photographs helped fill burgeoning museum photography collections in the later decades of their lives, their careers also led directly and indirectly to the creation of academic programs, publishing enterprises, and professional societies. 

The exhibition draws its title from a recurring phrase in Minor White’s diaries and letters. When White reflected on photography as a “way of life,” he thought about his own artistic ambitions, which his teaching career helped sustain, and he thought about training students to pursue similar dreams. But he also saw photography as a vehicle for personal growth, a means of self-cultivation that pointed far beyond careers or academic disciplines. As a founding editor of Aperture, the photography magazine launched in 1952, he built an influential platform for all aspects of this vision. Aperture distinguished itself from the era’s other photography magazines; it became a preeminent showcase for creative photography and shaped conversations about photographic education. As the exhibition illustrates, Siskind and Callahan, whose works appeared prominently in Aperture, were cornerstones of White’s vision for the field. 

Sharing their art and ideas in degree programs, workshops, exhibitions, photobooks, and magazines, White, Siskind, and Callahan built a devoted audience for their pictures and guided the artistic aspirations of their era. As the three photographers introduced a rapidly growing population of eager beginners to the building blocks of their field, from cameras and darkroom techniques to print study and publishing, they also built a network of makers and admirers of photography. Together, they embodied a vision of living and learning through photography, laying foundations for subsequent generations of photographers.

Drawing on the rich photography collections of the Art Museum and its Minor White Archive, Photography as a Way of Life brings together well-known and rarely seen photographs and archival materials that illuminate photography’s complex connections to art, education, and media in the postwar United States. Along with finely crafted prints of the three artists’ iconic black-and-white images, the exhibition delves into unpublished manuscripts and rarely seen color works—including a reconstruction of White’s Slow Dance, a projected sequence of color slides he performed for live audiences in the late 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition also animates the crucial role of print media, from popular Photography and Aperture to poetry journals and The Black Photographers’ Annual, in expanding the networks of the era. Tracing these networks, the exhibition features the work of more than forty other artists, from Alfred Stieglitz and Dorothea Lange to Anthony Barboza and Donna-Lee Phillips.