[citation needed] He helped start the photography magazine Aperture, considered the only periodical produced for, and by, photographers practicing the medium as a fine art.

During his early years, he spent a great deal of his time with his maternal grandparents and enjoyed playing in their large garden, later influencing his decision to study botany in college.

[7] During the same period, he took publicity photos for the Portland Civic Theater, documenting their plays and taking portraits of the actors and actresses.

[5] White resigned from the Art Center in late 1941 and returned to Portland, intending to start a commercial photography business.

The following year the Portland Art Museum gave White his first one-man show, exhibiting four series of photos he took in eastern Oregon.

Three of his longer poems, "Elegies," "Free Verse for the Freedom of Speech," and "Minor Testament," addressed his war experiences and the bonds of men under extreme conditions.

While in New York, he met and became close friends with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, who worked in the newly formed photography department at the Museum of Modern Art.

Through their conversations, White came to adopt Stieglitz's theory of equivalence, where the image represents something other than the subject matter, and his use of sequencing pictorial imagery.

Instead, White accepted Ansel Adams’s offer to assist him at the newly created photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco.

"[13] Over the next several years, White spent a great deal of time photographing at Point Lobos, the site of some of Weston's most famous images, approaching many of the same subjects with entirely different viewpoints and creative purposes.

Over the next six years, he enlisted some of the best photographers of the time as teachers, including Imogen Cunningham, Lisette Model, and Dorothea Lange.

Song Without Words, The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors, and Fifth Sequence/Portrait of a Young Man as Actor all depict "the emotional turmoil he feels over his love and desire for men.

The project, which he called City of Surf, included photographs of San Francisco's Chinatown, the docks, people on the streets, and various parades and fairs around town.

Later that same year, a reorganization at CSFS resulted in a reduction in White's classroom time, and he began to think about an employment change.

[18] Gurdjieff's concepts, for White, were not just intellectual exercises but guides to experience, and they greatly influenced much of his approach to teaching and photography throughout the rest of his life.

From his experience in Portland he developed the idea for a full-time residential workshop in Rochester in which students would learn through both formal sessions and, following a combination of thinking from Gurdjieff and from Zen, through an understanding gained by the discipline of such tasks as household chores and early morning workouts.

After being appointed as a Visiting Professor, White moved to the Boston area and purchased a 12-room house in suburban Arlington so he could increase the size of his residential workshops for selected students.

"[25] White began writing the text for Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations, which was the first monograph of his photographs, in late 1966, and three years later the book was published by Aperture.

[26] During the next several years White conceived of and directed four major themed photography exhibitions at MIT, starting with "Light7" in 1968 and followed by "Be-ing without Clothes" in 1970,[27] "Octave of Prayer" in 1972 and "Celebrations" in 1974.

He devoted more and more time to his writing and began a long text he called "Consciousness in Photography and the Creative Audience," in which he referred to his 1965 sequence Slow Dance and advanced the idea that certain states of heightened awareness were necessary to truly read a photograph and understand its meaning.

[citation needed] In 1975 White traveled to England to lecture at the Victoria and Albert Museum and to teach classes at various colleges.

He continued on a hectic travel schedule for several weeks, then flew directly to the University of Arizona in Tucson to take part in a symposium there.

He spent much of his time with his student Abe Frajndlich, who made a series of situational portraits of White around his home and in his garden.

[29] A few months before his death White published a short article in Parabola magazine called "The Diamond Lens of Fable" in which he associated himself with Gilgamesh, Jason and King Arthur, all heroes of old tales about lifelong quests.

)"[32] In his later life he often made photographs of rocks, surf, wood and other natural objects that were isolated from their context, so that they became abstract forms.

He was influenced initially by Stieglitz, who in his teaching emphasized that photographs shown in a structured content may support each other and may create a total statement that is more complex and meaningful than the individual images by themselves.

[36] For the rest of his life he spent a great deal of time grouping and regrouping his photographs into specific sets of images that varied in number from 10 to more than 100 prints.

He described what he called a sequence as a "cinema of stills"[36] that he felt would impart a "feeling-state"[36] created by both the photographer and the personality of the individual viewer.

"[39] During his lifetime White created or planned about 100 groups of his photographs, including sequences (with multiple versions), series and portfolios.

[40] Many were named simply "Sequence" followed by a number, but for several he added artistic titles that reflected his ideas that photographs represent more than their obvious subject matter.