Harry Callahan
Photographs from the 1940s & 1950s
“If you choose your subject selectively — intuitively — the camera can write poetry.”
Harry Callahan
Harry Callahan (1912 – 1999) was an American photographer and educator who was a leader in the Modernist movement. He is known for his lyrical and original way of viewing the every day in both urban and natural environments. A self-taught photographer, he began making photographs in 1938 while working for Chrysler Corporation in Detroit. A workshop with Ansel Adams, famed and admired for his sharp-focused, majestic views of nature, awakened Callahan to the potential of the camera. He was also introduced by a colleague, Arthur Siegel, to László Moholy-Nagy’s experimental approach at the New Bauhaus School of Design (founded 1937) in Chicago.
Detroit, 1941 (Reeds in Water)
Gelatin Silver Print, printed later
8 x 10 inches
Signed recto, lower right, below image, in pencil
Detroit, 1943
Gelatin Silver Print, printed later
8 x 10 inches
Signed in stylus on recto margin.
Within the first few years of the 1940s, he developed nearly all of the subjects that would sustain him through a life in photography. Moholy-Nagy hired Callahan to teach with him in 1946 at the reincarnation of the New Bauhaus, the Institute of Design (from 1944), Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, where Callahan continued until arriving at RISD in 1961.
With remarkable insight, Callahan combined Bauhaus innovation with a belief that the medium could express a personal vision. Documenting his life, he developed a singular aesthetic with a drive for experimentation which has had a lasting influence on post-war photography.
Telephone Wires, 1945
Gelatin Silver Print, printed later
10 x 8 inches
Signed in stylus on recto in margin.
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"In 1941 I was introduced to a photography that had unlimited possibilities for me. I can honestly say that for the past five years I have devoted every spare moment to thinking about and doing photography as a means of expressing my feelings and visual relationship to life within me and about me… My project could only be to photographs as I felt and desired; to regulate a pleasant form of living; to get up in the morning—free to feel the trees, the grass, the water, sky or building, people— everything that affects us; and to photograph that which I saw and have always felt. This, I know, is not a definite project because life itself is not definite, but it could be part of a lifetime project to help keep photography alive for me and with the hope that it would be alive for someone else."
Harry Callahan
From an early 1940s statement by Harry Callahan in an application for a fellowship from the Museum of Modern Art
Eleanor, Chicago, 1947
Gelatin Silver Print, printed later
4 1/2 x 3 1/4 inches (image size)
7 x 5 1/2 inches (paper size)
Signed in ink on recto.
Among his best-known works are the numerous portraits of his wife, Eleanor, who served as a constant model throughout his career. When Callahan photographed Eleanor, he often combined tightly framed or cropped images with high contrast, reducing Eleanor’s image or figure to a study of abstract forms in light or shadow.
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Fellow photographer Minor White wrote about Callahan’s work in Aperture’s 1958 Summer issue:
Two traditions of photography merge in the photographs of Harry Callahan; that of the century-old pure photography and the generation-old experimental photography. The second was called The New Vision in 1929 by its pioneers, members of the Bauhaus in Germany. As often happens at the start of an art movement, vigorous rawness marked the pictures of the New Vision. In the three hectic decades since refinement has set about to smooth the awkwardness. Callahan's work in this vein is precise, delicate, exquisite, and mastered. To Callahan, and to many others because of his achievements, experimental photography is not something to be dabbled in, but is a style of expression and a school of creativity.
Weed Against Sky, Detroit, 1948
Gelatin Silver Print
7 x 7 inches
Signed by Artist in pencil on recto.
Chicago, 1948
Gelatin Silver Print, printed later
7 5/8 X 9 5/8 inches
Signed in pencil by artist on print margin recto.
Eleanor, Chicago, 1949
Gelatin Silver Print, printed later
8 x 10 inches
Signed in stylus on recto; signed in pencil on verso
Chicago, 1950 (Trees in Snow)
Gelatin Silver Print, printed later
8 x 10 inches
Signed in pencil on recto bottom right margin.
Unlike what one might expect from a photographer associated with the Institute of Design in Chicago, Callahan's photographs rarely focus on form exclusively to highlight the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. Instead, his work finds an intersection between formal analysis and the experience of it in everyday life. One of his most frequent collaborators in exploring this intersection was his wife Eleanor, who served as subject and muse in many of his pictures.
Callahan often juxtaposed Eleanor’s living, breathing, nude body with simple geometric shapes and linear arabesques, as here, or outside in the natural world. When Eleanor is in the picture, she is the anchor of its composition, knotting the inanimate objects together and transforming them into echoes of her body. In this picture, the radiator warmly reiterates the verticality of her body, while the spindly, calligraphic lines drawn on the wall reduce her soft curves into a concentrated essence. In other images by Callahan, the same curvilinear flourishes are found as plants against blank, white skies and as the edge of touching body parts in close-up images of Eleanor-elucidating Callahan's elemental, spiritual understanding of the way the visual world is constructed.
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Eleanor, Chicago, 1959
Gelatin silver print, printed later
8 x 10 inches
Signed in stylus on recto
"I sort of believe that a picture is like a prayer; you’re offering a prayer to get something, and in a sense it’s like a gift of God because you have practically no control—at least I don’t."
Harry Callahan
In 1956, Callahan was leading Chicago’s Institute of Design when he received funding from the Graham Foundation to pursue a project of his choice. Following advice from Edward Steichen, he took a sabbatical year and traveled to Europe with his wife, Eleanor, and seven-year-old daughter, Barbara. After spending two months in Germany, they settled in Aix-en-Provence from September 1957 to July 1958. This marked Callahan's first time leaving North America, as his previous work had primarily focused on Chicago and the American Midwest landscapes. Moving past what he referred to as the “picturesque” aspect of the French town, he diligently delved into a deeper exploration of his subjects. As usual, he spent mornings capturing scenes with his camera and afternoons in the darkroom. Callahan viewed his time in Aix-en-Provence as a period of abundance and complete pleasure.
Aix-en-Provence, France, 1958
Gelatin silver print, printed early 1960’s
9 x 7 inches
Signed recto, lower right, below image, in pencil
Harry Callahan left Chicago in 1961 to head the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he remained until 1973. He won many awards for his photography, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 and the Photographer and Educator Award from the Society for Photographic Education in 1976, and he was designated Honored Photographer of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France in 1977, and received ICP's Master of Photography Infinity Award in 1991.
Callahan's work is in the collections of major museums and private collections around the world. Among the major exhibitions of his work during his lifetime were Photographs of Harry Callahan and Robert Frank (1962), one of the last shows curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art (1976) and at the National Gallery in Washington, DC (1996).
