Minor White: Rites & Passages- His Photographs Accompanied by Excerpts from his Diaries and Letters; Biographical Essay by James Baker Hall (An Aperture Monograph)

Minor White excelled at noticing and reproducing those graphic istances where the world offers the eye a piece of simple beauty that's outside the preserve of our cliches. The cover is a photo of English Ivy curving down a weathered board fence. There's a powerful print of snow dusting the windows of a wooden barn and the necessary shots of weathered trees. White's vision was germinal. He inspired millions to take up their cameras and look at the details: to expand the notion of what beautiful meant. Of course, this is more than a point-and-shoot exercise. The Zone system of exposure that enabled White and others to assign gray-scale values to brightnesses in the subject is as much the heart of the matter as are the subjects. These prints are dramatic and they are also prophetic. They are a finger pointing at the world and also pointing at the world of photography to come. By the way, the availability of these volumes at such low prices should be the inspiration to start a collection of photo books. Lynn Hoffman, author of the novel bang BANG

For some reason monographs of and about Minor White seem far and few between. This is a welcome book as a consequence. I would however have liked to have seen the photographs and text organised in a different way, keep the information about home separate from the images themselves. I've not seen much of Minor White's work in the flesh so I can't comment on the quality of the reproductions, but the book itself is a delight to hold and look at.