"Telegraph Poles," a rare LOCAL photographic gemstone, goes to auction

Among world-renowned photos by Newark's Clarence H. White being sold by Licking County Historical Society April 8 is one entitled "Telegraph Poles."

Here's how the auction house catalogue describes the famous photograph, in part:
Clarence H. White's 'Telegraph Poles' offers a spare and modern view of Newark, Ohio, where the photographer lived from 1887 to 1906. It was in Newark that White began to photograph, while working as a clerk at Fleek and Neal, the grocery wholesaler where his father was employed. White's distance from the artistic epicenter of New York City makes his development as a photographer of real talent and sensitivity all the more remarkable. In many respects, 'Telegraph Poles' shows that White, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, was further advanced on the path to modernism than many of his contemporaries.
...
'Telegraph Poles' shows a small section of what had once been an extensive series of canals built throughout Ohio and extending to the Great Lakes. The canals facilitated trade and the transfer of freight throughout the state and, via the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal, to the east coast... In White's day, remnants of the canal were still present in Newark...

Here's what William B. Becker, director of the photographymuseum.com, wrote to me about that photograph:

"Having acquired a previously unrecorded, signed platinum print of this image in January, I can assure you that it is not some interchangeable work that would not be missed from a collection rich with other CHWs. This is not only a masterpiece, it was recognized as such from the time it was made. (Please see the attached quotation, which hit me like a lightning bolt when I discovered it.) And only four platinum prints of 'Telegraph Poles' are known."

Here is that quotation:

The most notable instance of Mr. White's ability to extract beauty from the homeliest material is the print entitled Telegraph Poles. The scene appears to be a canal, on the banks of which are poles and irregular buildings, separated by vacant spaces, like teeth and stumps and gaps in an old crone's jaw—an unsightly, even squalid, spot, at least to the stranger; but to the man who has seen it under all sorts of aspects of light and weather, moreover, with an artist's eye, alive to the abstract fascination of mere lines and masses, of mingled variety of tone, this most unsuggestive subject has revealed possibilities which have yielded an original and strikingly beautiful picture.

If I am addressing any one who has hitherto regarded art as the mere imitating of objects, this picture should open up a new idea. It would seem that it is not so much the objects as the use which the artist makes of them that constitutes art, the little something of himself mixed in with the ingredients, the personal alchemy that transmutes the commonplace into the beautiful. So, if you want your portrait taken, it may be less important what clothes you wear than whom you select to photograph them.

--Charles H. Caffin, Photography as a Fine Art: The Achievements and Possibilities of Photographic Art in America (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1901) pp. 121-122 [reprinted from Everybody's Magazine]

For more information on White, visit the Newark Tea Party Clarence H. White Gallery at this link. For more information on the sale of White's prints by the Licking County Historical Society, go to the box at the top of this page and type in "photography."