White described his sequences as being like “a cinema of stills” and called on the viewer to be an active participant in experiencing the varied moods and associations that come to the fore while moving from one photograph to the next.  “To engage a sequence,” White wrote, “we keep in mind the photographs on either side of the other in our eye.”  Over the course of his career, White created over one hundred sequences, series, and portfolios.  Viewers of his sequences must not only read each individual image in relation to adjacent images but also consider all of the images in a highly structured grouping as the complete expression of an idea.  As Peter C. Bunnell has aptly pointed out, White’s sequences have many levels of meaning, but these can be generally categorized into three main groups: superficial, underlying, and ultimate.   The superficial meaning is descriptive; the underlying meaning is symbolic, and the ultimate meaning is intensely personal and thus the most elusive.  Picking out the ultimate meaning requires both a good deal of concentration and a thorough understanding of what was going on in the artist’s life.   (page 10)

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