BRATTLEBORO — Photographer Jade Doskow presents a hands-on photography workshop inspired by the work of Minor White on Saturday, Aug. 28, at 4 p.m. at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC).
Participants will tour the exhibit “Sequences: Ode to Minor White,” then move out into the field (weather permitting) to create photographs inspired by White's vision.
Doskow will illuminate the conceptual and technical approaches in several key photographs of White's to inspire the day's shoot.
As described by Artnet, “Minor White was an American photographer known for his meticulous black-and-white prints of landscapes, architecture, and men. White's interest in Zen philosophy and mysticism permeated both his subject matter and formal technique. 'At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us,' he once said.”
This workshop is for adult photography enthusiasts (ages 18 and older) at an intermediate level. Participants are expected to bring their own cameras.
Doskow, a large-format architectural and landscape photographer and professor, is the artist-in-residence at Freshkills Park in New York City. Her artistic practice is based on a longstanding passion for the complexities and nuance of transformations within public urban space.
Her photographs of Freshkills, formerly New York City's largest household garbage dump, were published on Aug. 14 in The New York Times in a collaborative piece with the writer Robert Sullivan (“How the World's Largest Garbage Dump Evolved Into a Green Oasis”).
Doskow's work has also been featured in multiple publications. She was showcased in the 2018 book 50 Contemporary Women Artists and is the subject of the new documentary Jade Doskow: Photographer of Lost Utopias.
Doskow is on the photography faculty of the City University of New York and the International Center of Photography. She holds a B.A. from New York University and an M.F.A. in photography, video, and related media from the School of Visual Arts.
“Sequences: Ode to Minor White” is a group exhibition, curated by Katherine Gass Stowe, of contemporary works of art that are evocative of the influential work of American photographer, writer, and educator Minor White (1908–1976).
The exhibit includes work by Andrea Belag, William Eric Brown, Niqui Carter, and Kevin Larmon, along with a selection of vintage photographs by White on loan from the Bank of America Art Collection and a concurrent outdoor art installation in Walpole, N.H., by Jessica Judith Beckwith.
Born in Minneapolis, Minor White studied with the celebrated art historian and critic Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. While working as a staff photographer at the Museum of Modern Art, he was inspired by Nancy Newhall's 1946 exhibition of work by Edward Weston.
White, the co-founder and editor of the photography magazine Aperture, was influenced by Group f/64, which included Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, and others.
In the late 1940s, he taught at the California School of Fine Arts, where he befriended Weston and Ansel Adams.
He went on to teach at the Rochester Institute of Technology, during which time he made some of his most enduring and famous images. Several of these photographs are included in the BMAC exhibit.
BMAC will also present “Minor White: Photographer, Teacher, Advocate,” an online talk by art historian Catherine Barth, Ph.D., on Thursday, Sept. 30, at 7 p.m.