What else is it?

Phillips Educator Carla Freyvogel shares how the Guided Meditation participants responded to artworks.

Photographer Minor White said: “One does not photograph something simply for ‘what it is’, but for what else it is.”

Our Wednesday Virtual Guided Meditation group, after a 30-minute meditation led by Aparna Sadananda inspired by White’s photograph, contemplated my slides of White’s stunning images: abstracted forms, mystical compositions, stark but lovely landscapes. They then weighed in on “what it is” and “what else it is.” True to form, our creative community did not disappoint as they shared observations (via the Zoom chat) with eloquent language and poetic insights.

Collection item 2006.004.0003 — Minor White, *Beginnings (Frosted Window), Rochester, New York*, 1962, Gelatin silver print, The Phillips Collection, Gift of the Phillips Contemporaries, 2006

From our collection, Minor White’s photograph Beginnings (Frosted Window), Rochester, New York from 1962, prompted these observations:

High contrast, unusual context, night, and mystery

Aerial view of people, four people, the tops of their heads

Hold breath a bit

Be comfortable with the unknown and the strange

Boat-like shapes, beach umbrellas

Foliage, upper layer, lower layer

Eerie, a bit.

Crystalline and filamentous

Artistically scientific

Minor White Happy Farmyard — Minor White, *Happy Farmyard, Grande Ronde Valley, Oregon*, 1941, Gelatin silver print

With an image from 1941, Happy Farmyard, White’s submission to a photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the responses were:

The tree in the foreground looks pretty unhappy to me

It looks too distorted for happiness

Maybe the tree IS dancing

Maybe the tree is a survivor?

Bare as it is, it seems free and swaying, dancing

With an impression of light

And there are no people so nature is happy

The barn door is open so animals are free to come…and to go

Harvest complete, successful working season over.

With a stark photograph by White of barns in a harsh field crossed by shadow, we contemplate barns—“What is it about barns?” I asked. So many American artists seem interested in the barn as subject matter. We look at Georgia O’Keeffe’s My Shanty, Lake George, and paintings by other artists, even Duncan Phillips’s small oil from.