From the 1940s to the 1970s, amid booming markets for snapshots and picture magazines, photography emerged as a field of study in higher education. The photographers Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan were icons among the first generation of college-level photography teachers. Through their influential careers, which had lasting impacts far beyond their classrooms, these artists reimagined photography as a livelihood and a life’s work.
Leading groundbreaking programs, White, Siskind, and Callahan transformed the ways photography was taught, practiced, shown, and understood. Sharing their art and ideas in workshops, exhibitions, photobooks, and magazines—including the photography magazine Aperture, with White as its founding editor—the three photographers built a devoted audience for their pictures and guided the aspirations of their era. Together, they embodied a vision of living and learning through photography, laying foundations that subsequent generations of photographers would build upon.
Drawing on the rich photography collections of the Princeton University Art Museum and its Minor White Archive, Photography as a Way of Life brings together well-known and rarely seen photographs and archival materials that illuminate photography’s complex connections to the visual arts, education, media, and self-cultivation in the postwar United States.
This exhibition is organized by the Princeton University Art Museum and curated by Brendan Fay, associate professor of art history in the School of Art and Design at Eastern Michigan University. The exhibition at Princeton was made possible by leadership support from Jim McKinney and the late Valerie McKinney; Anne Robinson Woods; Sandy and Robin Stuart; the Wyeth Foundation for American Art; and other generous donors.
