Career
White was born in New York City on July 25, 1907. He entered the film industry as an assistant cameraman at Goldwyn Studios during the transition to sound, working in that capacity on pictures including Whoopee! (1930) and Smilin' Through (1932), before joining Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
His first credit as a director of photography was The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933). At MGM he worked chiefly on the studio's lower-budget output rather than its prestige productions, photographing several films in the Andy Hardy series, among them Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), and in the Dr. Kildare series.
In the later part of his career White worked for Republic and Allied Artists, where his assignments turned towards genre pictures; the best known of these is the science-fiction film The Monster That Challenged the World (1957). During the 1950s he also photographed episodic television, including instalments of Navy Log, The Millionaire, Crossroads, Boots and Saddles, Rescue 8 and The Rifleman.
Writing about him in 2026, the cinematographer Richard Crudo, a former president of the American Society of Cinematographers, described White as belonging to a largely unheralded group of studio cameramen whose work was prolific and widely seen but never attained the reputation of contemporaries such as Gregg Toland.
