Windowsill Daydreaming

Minor White was an influential photographer, teacher at Rochester Institute of Technology and MIT, curator at George Eastman House, publisher of the magazine Aperture, and photography essayist. Taking inspiration from from Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents—photographs of the sky in which Stieglitz saw metaphorical equivalents of emotional states—White sought to imbue his photographs of the natural world or domestic environment with spiritual and emotional content. “At first glance a photograph can inform us,” he wrote. “At second glance it can reach us.”