HARRY CALLAHAN (1912-1999), PROVIDENCE, c. 1969 gelatin silver print, printed c. 1975; 7 3/8 x 7 3/8 in. (image); signed recto, lower right, pencil; Condition: Excellent. HC-0009

Rocks in a field covered with ferns.

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HARRY CALLAHAN

Harry Callahan was one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. Callahan, like Aaron Siskind and Frederick Sommer, respected the objectivity of straight photography, but used its ability to replicate the everyday world to reinvent it, “to charge it with personal, even mythic, resonance.” Callahan was the son of a Midwestern farmer who moved to Detroit to get work in the auto factories there. When he was a 26 year-old clerk in the shipping department of Chrysler Motors. Callahan joined the Chrysler camera club and then the Detroit Photo Guild. In 1941 he met Ansel Adams who came to give a workshop. Callahan was struck by “Adam’s crisp nature studies and precise prints… [which] stood in stark contrast with the soft-focus, manipulated imagery practiced in the camera clubs. Adams’ pictures demonstrated how clear, sharp, highly detailed descriptions of the visible world could be expressive. Adams offered him Stieglitz’s model of transcendentalism and equivalency. “I wanted something important, something spiritual in my life then” Callahan later reported. In the summer of 1942 Callahan traveled to New York to meet Stieglitz, but was too intimidated to show his photographs. He admired Stieglitz’s series of portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, which inspired him to begin the decades-long series of portraits of his wife Eleanor. Within two years of meeting Adams, Callahan developed the themes and techniques that would characterize his 50 year career. On one hand he experimented with modernist ideas derived from Bauhaus teachings. He experimented with cameras in a range of sizes, from 35 mm to 8 x 10 inch formats; and made multiple exposures, high-contrast prints and used both black and white and color film. On the other hand, he imbued his straight photographs of the every-day world with personal expression. Callahan explored a range of subjects – landscapes, architecture, and city streets as well as portraits of his wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara.

Around this time, Callahan befriended Detroit-area photographer, Arthur Siegel, who was a practicing photojournalist. Siegel had studied with László Moholy-Nagy, who founded the New Bauhaus school in Chicago. Through informal gatherings at Siegel’s house, he became acquainted with Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus teachings. In 1946 László Moholy-Nagy invited Callahan to join the Institute of Design in Chicago. Callahan felt that the photographer should turn the lens on himself and use his own life as a subject. He taught this concept to his students and followed the same model. Every morning Callahan would embark on a photographic journey through his neighborhood and spend his evenings developing the photographs he had taken that morning. Many of the photographs included Callahan’s neighborhood. In 1961 he moved to Providence, RI to establish the photography program at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, retiring in 1977. From the late 1940s to early 1960s, his central model and muse was his wife, Eleanor Callahan; and after 1950, his daughter Barbara. By the 1970s he had begun to focus on color photography. He had made color photographs for several years, but they existed only as Kodachrome transparencies. In the late 1970s he began to produce dye transfer prints. Callahan also began to concentrate more on exterior themes, such as the beach, the city and the land. In 1983 the Callahans moved to Atlanta where he developed his Peachtree series. According to the Center for Creative Photography, while Callahan photographed prolifically, he produced only about a dozen finished prints a year. Over the course of his career Callahan’s photographs were exhibited at galleries and museums around the world. He passed away in Atlanta on March 15, 1999.

Harry Callahan’s work is in the permanent collections of several museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, High Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, the Getty, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art and more. His archive is held at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.

© Britt Salvesen, Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work, 2006 and © Keith Davis, An American Century: From Dry-point to Digital, 1995

Excellent