A cinema of still images

Minor White’s work is finally the subject of a major retrospective exhibition in Europe. It takes place in Barcelona, ​​at KBr Fundación Mapfre, until September 6, and its curator, Carlos Gollonet, presents it with a quote from William Blake that the most visionary artists of video and experimental cinema could subscribe to: “If the doors of perception were cleaned, everything would seem to man what it is: infinite.”

Minor White (Minneapolis, 1908-Massachusetts, 1976) is not as well-known a photographer as Edward Weston or Ansel Adams, with whom he agrees in some aspects. His work also has affinities with that of two greats of abstract photography: Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. However, he is an author who developed his own contributions to photographic language, especially a personal ghostly abstraction and the notion of photographic sequence as a cinema of still images. He did so after receiving the influence of the natural landscape of the Californian coast and the Zen philosophy and mysticism of Evelyn Underhill.

His coastal and ocean landscapes photographed in the 1940s in places like Devil’s Slide, Matchstick Cove, San Pedro Point and Lands End are as sublime as Ansel Adams’ mountain panoramas. His male nudes may not reach the formal excellence of Edward Weston’s female nudes, but his abstract landscapes taken and composed in Point Lobos around 1950 are more suggestive than those of his colleague made in the same places.

White was a poet and knew how to define his photographic poetics. He stated that “all photographs are self-portraits,” even though they may look like landscapes and other things. And he could detail his reflection: “Although rocks were photographed, the subject of the sequence is not the rocks; although symbols seem to emerge, these are nothing more than indications of meaning. The sequence swirls in the mood that it awakens in the viewer; and its flow swirls in the river of its associations as it passes from one image to another. The rocks are nothing but objects over which meaning is spread like sheets hanging in the sun to dry.”

This KBr exhibition has the virtue of knowing how to present successive photographic sequences, with splendid moments of seascape (Song without words, 1948), mineral abstraction (Fourth sequence, 1950), urban landscape (Intimations of disaster, 1952), or the culminations of his style that represent the ghostly abstraction of Sound of one hand (1960) and Totemic sequence (1974). His urban sequences anticipate the work of authors like Friedlander and others, but surely his strong point is his suggestive and subjective abstractions. There are two Minor White mottos that I love. The first: “Photograph things not for what they are, but for what else they are.” The second: “Immerse myself beyond reason.”

And beyond reason we were transported by the big night of the Mad Cool festival that brought together the music and figures of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, David Byrne and Pulp, one concert after another. Nick Cave was exultant, wild, euphoric, heartbroken, and was even on the verge of crying with emotion. I had not seen such a catharsis since the presentation in Barcelona of For the children of yesterday, today and tomorrowby Pina Bausch. When things were going best, Nick would drop his best punk compliments: “Fucking Spain!”, “Fucking Madrid!”. The same energy as in 1985, when he performed at 666 in Poblenou and for the program stock of pop, but now with more records. Then Byrne gave us an hour or so of happiness and lucidity, with a lot of Talking Heads repertoire, although shorter than in his memorable concert on the tour American utopia, at the Cruïlla festival, by the sea. And Pulp signed the end with his Common people.

And good news: the appearance of a new art gallery in Barcelona. Premium Art debuted with Perico Pastor, now exhibiting the painting of Xano Armenter and, in August…, Walt Disney!