Minor
White took some of the ideas raised by Stieglitz’s Equivalents and ran with them, especially the theory that the
natural world is a springboard for metaphoric associations. In 1953 White moved
to Rochester, New York, to become the assistant curator of photography at the
George Eastman House, as well as the editor of its journal, Image. In contrast to the great drama of sites such as Point Lobos that
he shot in California in the late 1940s and early 1950s, White found the
eastern landscape to be “spiritually flat.” Using infrared film in this
photograph, he heightened the contrast and accentuated the scene’s duality
between light and dark, creating a sharply defined image that verges on the
surreal, dreamlike, and otherworldly.