Aperture Conversations: Minor White’s Photography and Legacy

Aperture Conversations

Memorable Fancies: Minor White’s Photography and Legacy

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

6:30 p.m.

MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts

214 East 21st Street, 1st Floor (Big Room), New York, NY 10010

Join us for a special conversation celebrating Minor White’s legacy and the publication of (Princeton University Art Museum, 2025), the artist’s previously unpublished daybooks, written between 1931 and 1976. Todd Cronan, coeditor of this volume, will moderate a conversation with the photographers Lyle Ashton Harris, Aspen Mays, and Mark Armijo McKnight about White’s impact and influence. The speakers will consider the history of Aperture as part of White’s legacy, as well as their personal connections to his work and career, from imagery and subject matter to philosophies about teaching and self-discovery. 

White (1908-1976, born in Minneapolis) is regarded as one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century photography, known for revolutionizing the medium through a reconsideration of word-and-image relationships, sequencing, and audience. White influenced generations of photographers through his teaching, workshops, writings, exhibitions, and the cofounding of Aperture, which entered the history of photography with the first issue of its quarterly magazine in 1952. Its founders declared: “Aperture has been originated to communicate with serious photographers and creative people everywhere, whether professional, amateur, or student.” They believed their magazine answered a “vital need” in the field, responding to the growing impact of photography and a desire to create community around it. White was editor of Aperture magazine from 1952 to 1975. Today, Aperture remains a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. 

With an introduction from Sarah Meister, Aperture’s executive director, and Katherine A. Bussard, Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography and steward of the Minor White Archive at the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey, our esteemed panelists will engage in a discussion of White’s impact as documented in Memorable Fancies. 

This program is presented by Aperture, the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton University Press, and the School of Visual Arts. RSVP required. 

–– 

Sarah Meister is executive director of Aperture. She joined Aperture in May 2021, following more than twenty-five years at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she curated numerous exhibitions. She is author and coeditor of the three-volume series Photography at MoMA (with Quentin Bajac and others). She was also lead instructor for the online course Seeing Through Photographs and codirector of the August Sander Project. 

Katherine A. Bussard is Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey. She is a curator, scholar, and collaborator. She is the author and coauthor of five books, including the award-winning publications (2015) and (2020).

Todd Cronan is professor of art history at Emory University and editor-in-chief of nonsite.org. He is author of (2014), (2021), and (2023) and coeditor of Minor White, Memorable Fancies (2025). He has written on art and politics for Jacobin, The Nation, Brooklyn Rail, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Common Dreams.

Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice, ranging from photography and collage to video installation and performance art, examining the impact of race, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic globally through intersections of the personal and the political. Harris has been widely exhibited internationally, and his work is represented in numerous museum collections, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, and Tate Modern, London. Harris is professor of art and art education at New York University.

Aspen Mays is a photographer and installation artist. She has held solo exhibitions at Higher Pictures, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Light Work, Syracuse, New York; and the Center for Ongoing Projects and Research in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has been featured in ArtForum, Art Papers, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She is associate professor and chair of undergraduate photography, printmedia, and painting and drawing at California College of Arts. Her artist book, Tengallon Sunflower, was published in 2024 by Dais Books. 

Mark Armijo McKnight is a photographer who uses his practice to reconcile his own identity as a mixed-race person of color and as a gay man. He was a 2023–24 Guggenheim Fellow, and his first solo institutional exhibition,, was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is assistant professor of expanded photography at Rutgers University. 

–– 

Image: Cover of Minor White, Memorable Fancies, 2025. Edited by Todd Cronan and Peter C. Bunnell, with contributions by Andrew Kensett. Published by the Princeton University Art Museum and distributed by Princeton University Press. 

Host or Publisher SVA MFA Photography, Video and Related Media