Turn the pages of Stephen White‘s new book on California photography and every so often a familiar name or image jumps out.

Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 photograph of a migrant mother is here. One of Ansel Adams‘ pictures of Yosemite in winter shows up too.

But then you stop, unable to turn away from a black-and-white photograph of a deserted street in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The pavement glistens with rain like a scene in a noir crime flick, the neon sign of the Lotus Bowl restaurant is reflected in the wet sidewalk.

“That’s the only photograph I’ve ever seen by that photographer,” White says of the 1937 picture made by Wallace Fong, a photographer for the Chinese Digest.

“That’s just kind of what I specialize in my collection,” White says, referring to the mix of famous and lesser-known artists. “Because I collect on the basis of image more than I do on the basis of name.”

“A Country Called California: Photographs 1850s to 1960s” is White’s new book from Angel City Press. The exhibit California Stories, which includes many of the same images, opens Feb. 26 at the UCR/California Museum of Photography in Riverside.

Both book and exhibit are built from White’s personal collection of more than 1,000 California photos, images that he selected to present a full picture of the land, the history and the people.

“This is a collection that includes a really large percentage of extraordinary photos that do two things,” says Douglas McCulloh, a senior curator at the UCR/California Museum of Photography. (He’s seen the show though he did not work on it.)

“They are significant within photography and photo history, and they are of significant interest within the history of California,” he says. “Some of them are extraordinarily rare objects in the world.”

White also reached out to California writers to contribute to the book, including poet Suzanne Lummis, the granddaughter of early Los Angeles figure Charles Lummis, who gave White a poem titled “California’s Still Dreaming of Water.”

The foreword is by journalist and author Lynell George. Other essays were contributed by curator Jonathan Spaulding, UC Riverside professor Catherine Gudis, photographer Arthur Ollman, and arts writer Jim Farber (who has written for the Southern California News Group).

“It probably reflects my own political and cultural ideas,” White says. “California has a really lovely history as well as a really ugly history.

“I wanted to show both sides of it. And photographs are such a strong way of portraying that.”

The collector

When White opened a gallery dedicated to photography in 1975 in Los Angeles, it was one of the first-ever in the city.

It was, he says, a business he fell into in part to fund his personal photography collection.

“I really am a collector who was buying and selling photographs to develop my own collection,” White says. “Who had no other income, other than the gallery.

“And it forced me to deal with things differently as a collector,” he says. “Most collectors, once they bought something, they can just keep it because they weren’t dependent on that money.

“When things got tough, I had to sell things I didn’t really want to sell. But I had to feed my family and keep things going, and it developed a kind of interesting philosophy about collecting.”

In 1990, a Japanese museum approached White and asked if he was interested in selling his entire collection.

“I said, ‘Sure,’ thinking, ‘Well, yeah, I’m also interested in flying to the moon on a big plate,’” he says.

The museum bought his collection, which gave White and his wife Mus the freedom to close the gallery, now able to buy and sell photographs independent of the burdens of a physical gallery.

This time, instead of accumulating images that illustrated the history of photography, he collected thematically, focusing on areas such as war or aviation or California that interested him.

“It’s a fascinating state, and the photographs are fascinating, too,” White says.

Pictures in mind

White built the California collection of his book and exhibit through a mix of intuition and logic.

“A lot of it is just the construction of the piece itself,” he says of the photographs he purchased. “I’m always looking for kind of an offbeat way of seeing things.

“The other aspect is that I look at things both from an art historical perspective and a cultural history perspective,” White says. “And I’m interested maybe more in cultural history than I am in art history.”

He points to a photograph in the book as an example of the cultural appeal of the pictures he likes. Artistically, the image does not stand out, but the story behind the memorial for a man named Isadore Berkowitz spoke deeply to White.

“He was a handyman at a summer camp related to a Jewish workers group, almost like a union,” White says. “Instead of saluting the American flag in the morning, they had their own little red flag that they saluted for the workers of the world and not the U.S. government.”

Berkowitz and several others were tried and convicted of displaying a red flag, something that was illegal in California at the time. While awaiting sentencing, he hanged himself; the convictions were later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“These California stories. Stories of people that maybe we know the names, but we really don’t know,” White says. “This is what appealed to me.

“Like Lola Montez,” he says, referring to a photo in the book of the notorious 19th-century dancer and actress, who had been born in Ireland but renamed herself and romanced a string of lovers that included Franz Liszt and the king of Bavaria. “Who came to California and ended up in San Francisco doing her spider dance, where she’d pull up her skirts a bit and say, ‘Ew! A spider!’ And all the men would go, ‘Woo, woo, woo!’”

White singles out the work of Mell Kilpatrick, a longtime photographer for the Santa Ana Register, now the Orange County Register, and Joan Archibald, the artist who went by Kali, as two of his other favorites in the book.

“He specialized in car crashes,” White says of Kirkpatrick. “There’s actually a book of car crashes that I think his granddaughter put out. Those have such a noir feeling to them, the shots of the city, and that one elongated shot of the guy with the woman looking out the window.

“To me, those are fabulous photographs,” he says.

White had never heard of Kali when he bought about 55 of her prints from a man who told him he’d picked them up at a garage sale in Pacific Palisades. The work, which was shot in both black-and-white and color, and ranged from architectural images to more offbeat topics, spoke to him the moment he saw it.

“She started in the ’60s in Palm Springs after she moved into Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee’s house that they sold to her,” he says. “She used to develop things in her swimming pool. She was a little eccentric, to say the least.

Two months after he bought the Kali photos, a New York City gallery opened an exhibit of her work sourced from other collectors. Soon after that, journalists from publications such as the New Yorker wrote about the new discovery.

“She went from zero to 60,” White says. “It’s exciting and interesting when that happens.”

Still depths

White has nothing against the moving pictures; he earned a master’s degree in film at UCLA, he offers. But there’s something that’s always drawn him more to the images frozen in the split-second snap of a camera’s shutter.

“When you get down to a still photograph, to me, you have the foundation of what is really visual communication,” he says. “Because you can go back to that photograph many times, and often see things in it you didn’t see the first time or the second time.

“Photographs can have very complex structures, but appear very simple,” White says.

Most photographs fall into one of two categories, White says. Those for which the context of the image is perfectly clear, and those that ask the viewer to supply the context on their own.

“That’s a provocative way of looking at photographs,” he says. “If you have the information surrounding it, you will also find it often leads you, as it has me, into all these stories that you’d never even known existed.

“There are a lot of benefits of being able to kind of stop and smell the roses as they say,” White says. “In a world becoming increasingly fast-paced, where people have such short attention spans, you can take a photograph and enjoy it and learn about it.

“Maybe it leads you to other photographs, a story you knew nothing about,” he says. “Or people you’d never heard of who are now fascinating.”

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