Harry Callahan

Harry Callahan (1912–1999) was one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. A master of modernist experimentation, he found endless possibilities in a number of favorite themes: “nature, buildings, and people,” as he put it in 1975. Drawn from the Center for Creative Photography’s Harry Callahan Archive, this exhibition presents negatives, transparencies, proof prints, contact sheets, and other materials. Seen alongside photographic prints---some familiar, some previously unpublished---these archival items illuminate the processes and techniques Callahan used to express his visual ideas over the course of his sixty-year career.

Born in Detroit, Callahan studied engineering at Michigan State University before going to work for the Chrysler Motor Company. In 1936 he married Eleanor Knapp, who became the subject of some of his most important and iconic images. After buying his first camera in 1938, Callahan joined a local camera club and pursued photography as a hobby. He credited Ansel Adams, who conducted a workshop in Detroit in 1941, with “freeing” him to dedicate his life to art. Soon thereafter, in 1946, he was invited to join the staff of Chicago’s Institute of Design, a Bauhaus-inspired program founded by László Moholy-Nagy. He went on, in 1961, to establish the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He retired in 1977, two years after the establishment of his archive at the Center. In 1983, he moved to Atlanta, where he lived until his death in 1999.

Virtually self-taught, driven, taciturn by nature but endlessly inventive in his art, Callahan occupies a unique place in the history of photography. He pursued his chosen medium with complete dedication and faith, integrating his life and art in a highly disciplined but deeply intuitive manner. Callahan’s photography is exploratory rather than evolutionary, expressive as much as experimental. Ultimately, the Harry Callahan Archive demonstrates the truth of the artist’s own observation: “You could have maybe a whole man’s life in a body of photography.”

Pressetext

Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work