Wendel White photographs

Wendel A. White was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He was awarded a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. White taught photography at the School of Visual Arts, NY; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NY; the International Center for Photography, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology; and is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

The photographs in this portfolio are made with a large format, film-based camera, placed very close to the subject, and printed on paper with an inkjet printer. The images are available as prints in two sizes. These photographs are representations of objects, documents, photographs, and books stored in cases and file cabinets as treasured historical artifacts. The outcome of this effort is to transform the usually small and often fragile remnants of the struggle for freedom and equality into images larger in scale than the original subjects. The various collections include vernacular documents such as a payment receipt for a bank loan, long held objects of special importance in the history of places such as Auburn, NY, Eatonville, Fl or Omaha, NE and various official materials that recall the transformations of communities over time. The Manifest project is an effort to seek out objects in public/private collections that represent the material remains of slavery, abolition, segregation, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Albion Tourgee, Zora Neale Hurston, Harlem, the U.S. Civil War, and the Civil Rights Era to name a few of the narratives that inspired these photographs.

http://wendelwhite.com