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Clarence Hudson White, he was always
known as Clarence H White.
He took up photography around 1894 - '95,
with no formal training.
And he wasn't satisfied to just be a Kodaker.
In fact, he never had a Kodak camera.
He immediately bought a large format plate camera.
And I think that indicates that he wanted to take pictures
that were in the realm of art.
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As a teacher, I think he's one of the first people
to teach formal elements.
He talked a lot about composition.
And that becomes the basis for what
is now established as fine arts photographic teaching.
But it was not normal before him.
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This is a period in which photography-- as well
as the visual arts-- completely change.
And in fact, the exhibition that I'm working on
is trying to place Clarence White in this larger context
within the American cultural scene, the up
and coming market for photography at the time.
When you have such an influential figure, someone
who is so significant in the history of the medium,
extracting some of his DNA, those
are central markers that make this artist who
he was is going to be fascinating from my research.
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There are two major archives of Clarence White's photographs
that came down through his family,
long, long after his death.
He dies in 1925.
One of them ended up in the Library of Congress.
The other archive is up here at Princeton.
I had been studying pictorialist photography
before coming to Princeton.
And part of my choice to come here
is that we have all these amazing resources in terms
of the history of pictorialism as it's
exemplified by the Clarence White collection.
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He experimented with all kinds of different techniques.
And he worked in the period when photography
was transitioning from a scientific medium
to a legitimate artistic medium.
So to sort of track that transition
using a process of bringing the science back into it
is really cool.
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Anne McCauley reached out to me to help
her begin the process of characterizing the material
history of these Clarence White prints for her exhibition.
The challenge of creating an exhibition that spans time
is to tell the story and to place the objects
in the right period.
It's a lot of work.
How can we get to scale on this relatively quickly?
And that's when the idea of involving the students came in.
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We train freshmen, sophomores, juniors,
and they're learning to master the kind of technical tools
that we have here that are able to see right through surfaces,
and to tell us--
give us information about materiality.
And off they went with our lead scientists off to Princeton
to be able to work with their graduate students
in art history, their senior art historian, and the collection,
in order to bring this material to light, opening windows
and works of art we never could open before.
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One of the reasons we really wanted to involve students--
especially at the undergraduate level--
they haven't necessarily decided whether they're
going to gravitate towards the sciences or the humanities.
And this project fundamentally is both.
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On the sciences side, there's a very major technical component
to all of this that involves mastery of very sophisticated
analytical equipment.
My role in this project was to train undergraduates
who've never worked with a technique like this
to feel comfortable operating the instrumentation,
and to do it safely, and how to interpret the data that we're
getting out of it.
We chose to use x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy,
which is a technique that allows us
to identify the elements that are present in a photograph.
And also, it is a technique that we're
able to use without interfering with the photographs.
Once the signal is acquired, put it into context.
And that's where the humanities part comes in.
As a double major in the sciences and in art history,
I'm interested in how scientific thinking can
inform our historical work.
I'm seeing through this whole new sort
of lens and methodology.
This is not a methodology that I use very often.
So having this workshop is like a whole new introduction
to a set of techniques and tools that I can use.
It sort of showed me not only is this inquiry
accessible for someone who does humanities,
but it's also something that I can
do with a humanities background with the help of people
without a deeper scientific background,
but in conjunction with them, that we can work together
to create a project that is much more cohesive because it's
not two people working on two different things.
It's as though science and technology suddenly
realize that their best friend in the humanities is art.
And when they come together and they form this new entity,
we are creating the fundamentals of new academic work.
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There's a very rare opportunity to be in a very close presence
of photographs like this from the 1890s, or from the 1910s,
over 100 years ago.
It was really exciting being able to work
so hands-on with the objects and be really close to them.
Being able to actually interact with these prints,
being able to have that object in your hand was so great.
I usually don't have access to that sort of thing.
This is the first time I've gotten
to see them really up close.
For me, for someone who doesn't get to see this all the time,
it's really great.
What we realized was because of the amount of artworks
that we're going to have to process,
it was really going to become necessary to do
a lot of interpretation as the data was coming in,
to think on the fly.
So one of the things that really impressed
me was when we got to Princeton and we started this project,
we were just flying.
That was really impressive to see, just to watch the students
not only learn something, but really
get it built into them that quickly.
This is real life learning.
We're profoundly committed to providing
as many hands-on experiences for our students as possible.
I think this is a great example of that
in a way that foregrounds the experience of those students,
but then translates that experience into something
of value.
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The students did a fantastic job over the course of two days
to use the x-ray fluorescence spectrometers
to collect many, many spectra.
And we not only analyze the photograph in several areas,
but we also looked at the paper supports for the photographs.
And sometimes, there are many pieces of paper stuck together.
So all of those, if possible, were analyzed separately.
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He had an interesting portrait that
seemed to be a really straightforward, crisp image--
that normally, you would look at something like that
and think it's just a straight platinum print.
And the XOF machine was showing us
that it had good deal of chromium, which would point
to a gum bichromate printing.
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Just a few minutes ago, there is a print
labeled as a platinum print.
And all of a sudden, the student who was working at the station
said, well, this is weird.
There's this bichromate.
So that's what I would call a gum print.
But it's something that we bought was a platinum print.
So now, we think that perhaps it's platinum with gum over it,
or gum with platinum over it.
So something that we thought was your standard simple platinum
print is now something more complex.
We're discovering all kinds of new things about these prints,
about his collection.
There's a lot more experimentation
going on in printing in this photography moment.
And pretty much everything in museums
has been classed automatically as this is a platinum print.
And a lot of that is turning out to be wrong.
What these artists-- and they are artists--
what they're doing is really very different from print
to print.
And so I think that we're on the cusp of starting to really look
at this material seriously.
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This mountain of data has now entered into a database.
It's going into the collection catalogue.
And the collection catalogue is this essential tool
for all scholarship.
It's the record of what an object is, when it was made,
where it was from.
Largely, it was based on inference.
No longer.
It's based on empirical fact.
It's based on the analysis that we
were able to do as a collaborative project.
I'm just really particularly delighted
that this is the opportunity for a collaboration between Yale
and Princeton.
And I would simply say I don't think
we collaborate often enough.
I hope this is the marker of a wave of future collaborations
too.
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