Biography (Courtesy of Christian Peterson)
 
White played a leading role in pictorial photography both during and after the heyday of the Photo-Secession. His work was highly visible in Secession exhibitions and publications. White also became widely known as a photographic educator, teaching at established institutions and his own school. His pictorial photographs always featured soft-focus effects and a quiet, personal mood.
 
Clarence Hudson White was born in West Carlisle, Ohio, on April 8, 1871. Four years later, his family moved to nearby Newark, where he grew up. After finishing high school, White became a bookkeeper at a local wholesale grocer and worked there until 1904.
 
White made his first photographs in 1893, and by four years later was receiving awards for his artistry. Eighteen ninety-eight was an important year for him; his work was accepted at the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon, he organized the Newark Camera Club, and he traveled east to meet Alfred Stieglitz in New York. In 1899, he was the subject of one-person exhibitions at both the Camera Club of New York and the Boston Camera Club. Over the next few years, his star continued to rise. Stieglitz included four photogravures by him in Camera Notes, White juried salons in Chicago and Philadelphia, and he was admitted to London’s prestigious Linked Ring Brotherhood. F. Holland Day included his work in the New School of American Photography show, which was hung at the Royal Photographic Society, London, in 1900, and at the Photo-Club de Paris, the following year.
 
Stieglitz designated White as one of the founding member of the Photo-Secession in 1902, when the group’s premiere show was presented at New York’s National Arts Club. Subsequently, White’s pictures were seen in all the major Secession exhibitions, including the 1910 show at Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery, where he was the best represented American. His work was also presented in Camera Work, which featured twenty-five of his richly printed photogravures between 1903 and 1910.
 
White produced largely figure studies of family members, sensitively posed both indoors and out, with simple props like books, mirrors, and glass balls. The homespun subjects and subtle tones of his platinum prints reflected the photographer’s gentle, Midwestern nature. Beginning in 1897, they were extensively exhibited in this country and Europe, seen in shows in Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Dresden, Glasgow, Hamburg, Leeds, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Rochester, San Francisco, Syracuse, Toronto, Turin, and Vienna.
 
White attempted to make his living as a photographer after quitting his bookkeeping job in 1904. Still based in Ohio, he became a traveling portrait photographer, primarily in the Midwest. However, after only a few years of mixed success, he moved to New York in 1906, where he took up teaching. In 1907, Columbia University’s Teachers College hired him on as a lecturer, where he became acquainted with the artist Arthur Wesley Dow. White also taught at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and in 1910 established his own summer school of photography on an island in Maine. Four years later, he opened the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York, which, over many years, resided at various Manhattan locations. White promoted the integration of professional methods and pictorial aesthetics, inspiring such students as Paul Outerbridge, Jr., Ralph Steiner, and Margaret Watkins to produce creative commercial work.
 
White provided illustrations for some popular magazines, such as McClure’s and Everybody’s, as well as frontispieces for a few books. His most significant illustration job, however, was the 1904 poetry book Songs of All Seasons by Ira Billman, White’s uncle. Billman chose over forty images by his nephew, primarily landscapes and figure studies, and dedicated the publication to him.
 
After the disintegration of the Photo-Secession around 1910, White carried on the banner of pictorialism for the next decade and a half. He severed his relationship with Stieglitz and, in 1913, helped Edward R. Dickson commence the periodical Platinum Print. Three years later, he organized a new group, the Pictorial Photographers of America (PPA), for which he served as its first president. The PPA promoted inclusiveness and education, circulating popular exhibitions and publishing five volumes of its annual, Pictorial Photography in America, during the 1920s. In 1920, White also helped found the Art Center, a group of New York-based arts organizations that worked toward uniting art and industry.
 
In 1919, White presented a solo show of his work at the Erich Art Galleries in New York. Six years later, he was on a photographic trip in Mexico with some of his students when he suffered an aneurism of the aorta; he died in a Mexico City hospital on July 7, 1925. Friends and family members kept the Clarence H. White School of Photography running until 1943.
 
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
 
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
 
Biography provided by Focal press
 
A self-taught photographer of soft-focus images of family life in rural Ohio, White joined with Steiglitz in 1902 to help form the Photo-Secession. The first teacher of photography at Columbia University, New York in 1907, he founded the Clarence White School of Photography in 1914. An influential teacher, whose students included Bourke-White, Gilpin, Lange, Outerbridge, Steiner, and Ulmann, he became the first president of the Pictorial Photographers of America in 1916 in reaction against Stieglitz' shift to straight photography.
 
(Author: GW)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Wikipedia
 
Clarence Hudson White (April 8, 1871 - July 8, 1925) was an American photographer, teacher and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. He grew up in small towns in Ohio, where his primary influences were his family and the social life of rural America. After visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he took up photography. Although he was completely self-taught in the medium, within a few years he was internationally known for his pictorial photographs that captured the spirit and sentimentality of America in the early twentieth century. As he became well known for his images, White was sought out by other photographers who often traveled to Ohio to learn from him. He became friends with Alfred Stieglitz and helped advance the cause of photography as a true art form. In 1906 White and his family moved to New York City in order to be closer to Stieglitz and his circle and to further promote his own work. While there he became interested in teaching photography and in 1914 he established the Clarence H. White School of Photography, the first educational institution in America to teach photography as art. Due to the demands of his teaching duties, his own photography declined and White produced little new work during the last decade of his life. In 1925 he suffered a heart attack and died while teaching students in Mexico City.