When White was sixteen the family moved to the small town of Newark, Ohio, where his father accepted a job as traveling salesman for the wholesale grocery firm of Fleek and Neal.

Family records offer no indication of why the ceremony was held at that time, but within an hour after they exchanged vows White and his bride boarded a train bound for Chicago where they attended the World's Columbian Exposition.

Not only were there multiple very large exhibits showing photographers from around the world, there were many camera and darkroom equipment manufacturers displaying and selling their latest goods, dozens of portrait studios and even on-the-spot documentation of the Exposition itself.

My grandmother wore a great many hats, and all with real flair; she was wife, mother, business manager, model, aesthetic critic, stoic, and a buffer between my grandfather and many of the unpleasantnesses of life.

"[9] White was completely self-taught throughout his career, in part because he had no money to pay for training or courses at the time when he was developing his own vision in the medium.

What is remarkable about this period in White's life is the fact that his limited finances allowed him to create only about 8 photographs each month, yet the quality of those images was so consistently high that he quickly received widespread acclaim for his work.

[14] In 1898 alone White created several photographs that are among his most acclaimed, including The Bubble, Telegraph Poles, Girl with Harp, Blind Man's Bluff, and Spring ‒ A Triptych.

In order to advance his own knowledge of photography and to encourage others in his small home town, in 1898 White brought together a group of 10 local people to form the Newark Camera Club.

"[16] Through White's influence and connections, the very next year the club mounted a large exhibit at the local YMCA that included prints by Alfred Stieglitz, F. Holland Day, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Gertrude Käsebier and Eva Watson-Schütze.

In addition to this series of exhibitions, one of White's simple family scenes, a portrait of his son Maynard, was reproduced in Stieglitz's new journal Camera Notes.

His death did not seem to affect his son's artistry or his interests; White continued exhibiting while traveling around the Midwest and East Coast to take portraits of friends and clients.

White became close friends with Debs and other socialist leaders, including Clarence Darrow, Stephen Marion Reynolds and Horace Traubel, and for many years they exchanged correspondence and held long, philosophical discussions whenever they were in the same city together.

A little more than a year later, Stieglitz, sensing a growing number of photographers who held his same beliefs about the artistry of the medium, founded the Photo-Secession, the first organization in America to promote pictorialism and fine art photography.

White then illustrated his uncle Ira Billman's second book of poetry, Songs for All Seasons, and a magazine article called 'Beneath the Wrinkle" for McClure's, both in 1904.

"[24] Soon thereafter White won a Gold Medal at the First International Salon of Art Photography in The Hague and had several of his photograph shown in the inaugural exhibition by members of the Photo-Session at Stieglitz's new Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession.

They had made this outing an annual event since 1905, and the retreat from the summer heat and his business worries allowed White to concentrate solely on his work while there.

[27] He soon found himself in love with his new profession, which finally afforded him a modest but steady income while relieving him of any detail of managing a business (White was notoriously lax in billing and collecting from clients).

During this same year White and Stieglitz undertook an artistic experiment in which they jointly created a series of photographs of two models, Mabel Cramer and another known only as Miss Thompson.

[30] White asked his friend Max Weber to teach with him, and his colleagues Day and later Käsebier critiqued student work at the end of each summer session.

Attracted by White's reputation and by the modest tuition costs, the first students to the school came from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Ecuador and Egypt.

Stieglitz, who was already known for his domineering ways and dogmatic approach to photography, took his self-assigned, unilateral authority even beyond his past actions; in this case he proved to have gone too far for several people who had been closely aligned with him.

White was best known at the School for his weekly commentaries on students' work, described as "sympathetic yet searching criticisms that faithfully showed them how weak they were yet always somehow made them courageous and strong.

"[36] His student Marie Riggin Higbee Avery summarized what happened there by saying "The rigor of our training, together with the indominable [sic] spirit fostered in each of us, a result of Clarence White's teaching, was to carry a few of the least promising of the group to places of high honor in the photograph world.

White sought out and personally coached many aspiring female photographers, who found his openness to a variety of styles and techniques exactly what they were looking for at a time when most men had highly autocratic views.

Ralph Steiner recalled that "he didn't press hard for absolute perfection, but always found something to praise, [which] won him the worship of a lot of ladies.

The purpose of the new building was to allow the different organizations to regularly interact with each other and to provide a place where "the public standard of utilitarian art was raised.

He arrived in Mexico in early July, and, as a sign of White's reputation and influence, he was immediately visited by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles.

However, a poorly timed move to larger quarters to accommodate the new students coincided with the mobilization for World War II, and the School's enrollment soon plummeted.

It's been said that "White is most significant in the history of photography because, in his early years, he redefined the nature of picture-making, creating a distinctly modern idiom for his own time….

He reduced his compositions to very simple elements of form, and by experimenting with principles of design derived largely from Whistler and Japanese prints, he created a person style that was unique for photography.