Minor White Retrospective at Fundación Mapfre Madrid Explores Photographer's Sequences and Mysticism

Fundación Mapfre in Madrid presents a retrospective of American photographer Minor White from September 24, 2026, to January 10, 2027, following its Barcelona showing. Curated by Carlos Gollonet, the exhibition chronologically surveys White's career from the 1930s to the 1970s, featuring 160 sequences of vintage prints, including works never exhibited during his lifetime and most never before seen in Europe. White, a poet and mystic, advocated sequencing images—which he termed 'cine of frames'—to convey inner experience. The show highlights his early pictorialist works in Portland, his shift to austere formalism, and recurring themes of landscape, portraiture, and male nude. Key series include Rural Cathedrals (1955), Sound of One Hand (1960), and Intimations of Disaster (1952). White co-founded Aperture magazine and directed it for two decades; he also taught at the California School of Fine Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, and MIT. He studied under Ansel Adams and was influenced by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston. The exhibition marks fifty years after his death in 1976, when he bequeathed his archive to the Princeton University Art Museum.