Tony White

NYC Salt Scholar-in-Residence, Creative Photobooks

Tony has an abiding passion for connecting students with cool books by photographers, artists, designers, and printers. His teaching and book production practices are centered on innovation, technical mastery, imagination, and production, with a focus on the book as a unified conceptual work. He has taught studio courses on photobook and artist’s book production at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. And since 2018, he has taught The History of Artists’ Books Since 1950 in New York City, through the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. In this course, students publish a collaborative Risograph photobook, alter a book, and create a one-of-a-kind chopped mini-magazine. 

Tony has curated exhibitions of photobooks and artists’ books at Yale University’s Sterling Library, the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, the Lilly Rare Book Library at Indiana University Bloomington, the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago, the Printing History Museum in Houston, and Purchase College Library, among others. He has also curated photography exhibitions and installations at Untitled Space and Art Space New Haven. 

His publishing and public lectures focus on the post-1950s publications of artists’ books, photobooks, and related publications and practices. For over twenty years, he has focused on invited lectures and has written articles and book chapters. At present, he is writing his first book on photobooks and artists’ books.

For just over 30 years, he worked in academic and research art libraries, working with artists, photographers, art historians, critics, and designers. He has worked at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Northeast Document Conservation Center, National Park Service, Yale University Library, Pratt Institute Library, the Fine Arts Library at Indiana University Bloomington, the Decker Library at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, OCAD University, Toronto, and Purchase College at the State University of New York (SUNY). 

Tony has an MS in Nonprofit Management from Columbia University, an MLS from Indiana University Bloomington, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.