Minor White (1908-1976) was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied botany and poetry at the University of Minnesota. In 1938, he moved to Portland, Oregon and began his career in photography, joining the Oregon Camera Club, taking assignments from the Works Progress Administration, and exhibiting at the Portland Art Museum. White was drafted into the army in 1942 and served in military intelligence during World War II. In 1945, White moved to New York City, studying art at Columbia University and meeting other influential photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. Alfred Stieglitz was a major influence to his work, particularly through the notion of "equivalents," images where the object is secondary to the symbolic meaning which resonates with the viewer through an emotional "recognition" of form and structure. Inspired by this notion, White became fascinated by abstraction and the relationships formed by organizing a series of images in sequence. His equivalents included images of mundane objects including water, sky, and parts of building edifices. Writing about the notion of equivalents, White explains that he "...recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself." In 1946, White moved to San Francisco to join the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts, at the invitation of Ansel Adams. This became the first fine art photography department at an academic institution in the United States. White was also involved in the founding of Aperture magazine along with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and others; he served as editor for twenty-three years. It was at this time that White began work on the sequences of photographs that would become emblematic of his career. The first of these, Song Without Words, was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1948. White moved to Rochester, New York in 1953, where he worked as an assistant curator at George Eastman House and edited its magazine Image; he also taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology. White later moved to a home in Arlington, Massachussetts and served on the faculty of MIT for the last ten years of his life. Minor White died in 1976.