Although he was still working as a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocery in his native Newark, Ohio, when he made this picture, White had been corresponding with Stieglitz for five years and had been selected as a founding member of the Photo-Secession. More than any of his fellow Pictorialists, White excelled in making quiet luminous studies of home life, such as this picture of his son Maynard with an issue of Stieglitz’s new journal, Camera Work.Between 1903 and 1910, twenty-seven images by White were reproduced as photogravures in Camera Work, including—somewhat self-referentially—this image in issue 9, in 1905.
