Category: nudes

Minor White

 

Minor White, “Tom Murphy (San Francisco)”, 1948, Gelatin Silver Print from the Series “The temptation of Saint Anthony is Mirrors”

Minor Martin White was an photographer, theoretician, critic and educator. He combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies.

Starting in Oregon in 1937 and continuing until he died in 1976, Minor White made thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes, people and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow.

Minor White taught many classes, workshops and retreats on photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, California School of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in his own home. He lived much of his life as a closeted gay man, afraid to express himself publicly for fear of loss of his teaching jobs. Some of White’s most compelling images are figure studies of men whom he taught or with whom he had relationships.

The Snooker Table

The Playing Field;  The Snooker Table

Snooker gained its own identiry in 1884 when army officer Sir Neville Chamberlain, while stationed at Ooty, devised a set of rules that combined the games of pyramid and black pool. The word ‘snooker’ was a long used military term for inexperienced or first-year personnel. The game grew in popularity in the United Kingdom, with the Billards Association and Control Club was formed in 1919.

William Shakespeare: “Lo! The Wonders Upon Earth!”

“Lo! The Wonders Upon Earth!”

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
―William Shakespeare, A Midsummer’s Night Dream

 

The Center is at the Center of the Totality

“The Cental Point About Which the World Spins”

“This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Reblogged with many thanks to http://puppybra.tumblr.com

E.M. Forster: “Man is the Measure”

Photographer Unknown, Man is the Measure

“I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible-doing what was not contemplated by the Machine. Then I said to myself, “Man is the measure”, and I went, and after many visits I found an opening.”
― E.M. Forster

Reblogged with thanks to https://southafricangayboy.tumblr.com