Description

The Creative Photography Laboratory (CPL) at MIT was one of the most innovative university teaching programs in the arts during the nineteen sixties and seventies. At a time when academic instruction in photography as an art practice was virtually nonexistent, the CPL trained students to think visually using photography as a means of creative expression. Conventional instruction in photographic techniques and equipment was far less important at the CPL than looking and learning experientially with photographs.

The curriculum was inseparable from the artistic vision, humanistic ideals, and spiritual beliefs of the CPL’s founding director, Minor White. An influential educator and esteemed photographer and curator, White was deeply spiritual and saw photography as a way toward self-knowledge and an understanding of the sacred. As a result of his prominence and the influence of his pedagogy, the sacred and mystical in photography became a critical issue in contemporary art.

Under White’s direction for a decade, the CPL became one of the country’s important venues for new photography, exhibiting the work of more than 600 photographers. The program took a lead in the rapidly developing Boston photographic community though lectures and other activities, including a training center for aspiring photographers in Roxbury. Although photography had yet to become a focus of institutional or private collecting, White established an MIT collection of contemporary photographs that was exceptional for its time.

Following White’s death in 1976, the CPL became more practice oriented, introducing a graduate degree program with prominent photographers as visiting faculty. In MIT’s evolving media arts and sciences curriculum, photography was sidelined, and in 1983 the program was discontinued. The CPL’s history is preserved today in its archive and visual collections, a valued resource at the MIT Museum for the history of photography and photographic education.