Exploring Pictorialist Photographer Clarence White’s Ohio Origins

Beginning October 21, the Cleveland Museum of Art hosts a major retrospective of Ohio’s most important historical photographer, Clarence H. White (1871–1925). On view through January 21 in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895–1925 chronicles the compelling tale of White’s development from amateur to consummate professional and influential teacher by charting his path from Newark, Ohio, to New York City.

The bulk of White’s work, comprising his most important and characteristic creations, was produced between 1894, when he bought his first camera, and 1906, when he moved to New York. Because of White’s presence in Newark for eight years, the town became a nationally recognized hotbed of avant-garde photography. Its houses, thoroughfares, and countryside were the settings for White’s staged scenes, which depict his idyllic vision of an earlier, slow-paced, agriculturally based lifestyle rather than the industrialized Newark in which he actually lived. I began to wonder if any evidence of his Newark remained in the twenty-first century. I wanted to walk in the artist’s footsteps and pay homage to his Ohio origins. Since the city is just a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Cleveland, a pilgrimage seemed necessary.

I began to wonder if any evidence of his Newark remained in the twenty-first century. I wanted to walk in the artist’s footsteps and pay homage to his Ohio origins. Since the city is just a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Cleveland, a pilgrimage seemed necessary.— Barbara Tannenbaum, Chair, Prints, Drawings and Photographs, Curator of Photography

I visited Newark in May 2014, accompanied by fellow pilgrim Verna Curtis, former curator of photography at the Library of Congress. She had been enthusiastically studying White’s work for years and was armed with addresses and phone numbers so we could check out some of the houses White inhabited and frequented, as well as look for motifs from our favorite images. The third musketeer on this daylong adventure was my accommodating husband, Mark Soppeland, who drove and took many of the photographs.

Newark, the seat of Licking County, was home to around 15,000 people in 1900. Now a town of more than 49,000, it has spread far beyond the town limits White knew. Our first stop was downtown Newark and a brief detour at the Louis Sullivan “jewel-box” bank, which hadn’t yet been built when White left Newark for New York.

Then we sought out the building where, Monday through Saturday, White worked as an accountant for the wholesale grocery firm of Fleek and Neal. He would still be able to identify the building but would be shocked by the change in its setting. The three-story corner structure used to be bordered on one side by the Ohio and Erie Canal, which was completed in the 1830s and sparked Newark’s evolution from a tiny farming hamlet to a prosperous midsize town.

By the 1850s, the speed and lower cost of shipping via railroad began making the canal system obsolete. Even though it was no longer a commercial waterway, it nonetheless offered interesting scenery for his camera. In Telegraph Poles, taken in 1898 from a third-floor window at Fleek and Neal, he shows the canal flowing calmly, dividing downtown. Don’t expect to see it if you go to Newark today. Paved over long ago, it is now just an alley. The poles remain, although they undoubtedly transmit telephone calls rather than telegrams.

Along the Old Canal, taken in 1896, shows an industrial area that grew up around another part of the waterway. In that period, Newark was supported by agriculture, iron foundries, and factories that made tractor and railroad parts. Its largest industry, though, was glass.

The Heisey Glass Company, which made drinking glasses and dinnerware, was founded in 1895, a year after White took up the camera. The American Bottle Company, which combined several smaller, older glass factories, was the largest beer-bottle manufacturer in the world in the early twentieth century. White romanticized the industrial quarter in his photograph: the only evidence of the heat, roar, and hurly-burly of modern manufacturing is some steam rising from a factory chimney amid a still landscape.

By 2014 the canal had vanished and the factories had been shuttered, torn down, or converted for other uses. The tall smokestack so prominent in White’s photograph was nowhere to be found.

While downtown, we visited the Licking County Historical Society, which generously shared resources about White. Then we drove five minutes north to Hudson Avenue to see the house that White had built for his young family in 1901. He chose a new development that contained mansions as well as middle-class homes. His modest, two-story, Craftsman-style stucco home is right across the street from the grander house that belonged to his boss, Mr. Fleek.

In 1901 White had begun selling some of his photographs at national exhibitions for $25, a princely sum for a photograph in those days when only a select few people considered photography a fine art — and at a time when a man’s dress shirt cost $1 and bacon was 14 cents a pound. White was a young man on the rise.

The neighborhood has changed little in terms of its architecture, although its financial fortunes have risen and fallen and risen again over the intervening decades. We had hoped to see the inside of his former home, which was the setting for a number of his images, but we were stymied when no one answered the door. We know from White’s photographs that the large living room featured a massive stone hearth. Visible from outside was a bay window, probably the one with a window seat featured in some of his posed scenes. The next-door neighbors, who are related to the two brothers currently occupying White’s house, let us tour their home. Although its exterior is different, they say the layout is much the same as White’s former home, which remains largely unchanged from the time of the photographer’s occupancy.

White’s backyard bears no trace of the elaborate formal garden he created, with its fountain and pergola. It was just a short distance from (still-active) railroad tracks that run behind the houses on this side of the street. The stone wall visible in the photograph and a small stone building at the rear of the lot are later additions. It was fascinating to add the soundtrack of a freight train’s disruptive rumbling to the idyllic scenes White staged in his home and garden — to sense the truth beneath the fantasy.

We meandered down the street to the former home of architect George Ball, a friend of White, and his wife, Edith. Its current owners welcomed us in to see the rooms — with many original decorative touches still intact — where Clarence and Jane White had been frequent guests. The Balls’ garden with a pergola and stone pathways, photographed in its heyday by White, remains more or less intact and evoked for us the one White had so carefully planted and tended in his own backyard.

Our final stop was Cedar Hill Cemetery, a ten-minute drive from White’s old neighborhood. The historical society had given us a map that marked the approximate location of the White family plot, but locating it proved difficult and a bit arduous. Cedar Hill is a picturesque, pastoral cemetery of 113 acres, featuring winding roads (many missing their “street” signs), 36,000 graves, and, as its name implies, hills. We spotted a White monument atop a hill, but it was for a different White family.

Finally, success! It would have been easy to overlook the White plot, as it is marked only by a group of low marble rectangles that almost disappear into the grass. White died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm while leading a school trip to Mexico City. He was only fifty-four. Wealthy students had to advance money for his body to be returned to Newark for burial. Sharing the plot are his wife, Jane, and two of his three sons, along with their wives. We paid our respects and decided it was time to head for home.

Somewhere on the hike back to the car, my husband lost his cell phone, which contained many of the photos from the day’s adventures. We wanted to retrace our steps, but the cemetery was closing and the man locking the gate was unsympathetic. He took our contact information and assured us that the lawnmower would find the phone before he did. But the story has a happy ending. A couple of weeks later, we received a call from the cemetery explaining that they had mailed us the phone. When it arrived, we were able to retrieve the images. Those photographs must have had a guardian angel; perhaps his name was Clarence White.