In his book Mirrors Messages Manifestations, Minor White described the two afternoons he spent at Lobos State Park, California, photo- graphing “forms I had liked for about three years but would not photograph because of their obvious sexual implications. Being the victim of an emotional storm those afternoons, sex symbols were just what I needed. I had no need to study these familiar forms to photo- graph them; that had been done, so I worked very fast.” White’s photographs often present abstracted elements of the natural world as symbolic evocations of emotional states.