musician John Coltrane, which communicated a
newly found independence that has continued in
postwar African-American photographic art.
Three other photographers who carried the
photography of the 1940s into the 1950s and influ-
enced photographers for many years to come were
Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White.
Harry Callahan’s career began in the mid-1940s. He
was a self-taught photographer who was greatly
influenced by Adams, Stieglitz, and La ́szlo ́ Mo-
holy-Nagy (at Chicago’s Institute of Design,
where Callahan taught in the 1950s) but who forged
his own identity and style that was much more
personal than many of his peers. Having worked
in the darkroom at General Motors Photography
Department during the war, it was during a four-
month period in New York in 1946 that he met
Nancy and Beaumont Newhall who were impressed
by his work and showed it in the 1946 exhibition
New Photographers. His photographs followed in
the tradition of modernist experimentation of the
1920s and 1930s but have a much more humanistic
and personal quality. Callahan’s talent shows in his
incredibly fine images such asCattails against Sky
(1948) andWeed against Sky, Detroit(1948), but his
most famous and profound photographs are of his
favorite models, wife Eleanor and daughter Bar-
bara. Very intimate works, some of the photo-
graphs show his wife nude in a domestic interior
such as inEleanor, Chicago 1948, others are of her
emerging from still water, in shadow, or are ‘‘snap-
shots’’ of his family going about their daily lives.
New Yorker Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) is
remembered as one of the most noteworthy mid-
century photographers whose art is centered pri-
marily on one subject: the picture plane, a subject
that is also known as one of the most important
aesthetic issues in modern art. Although he was
actively engaged in the world of documentary
photography in his early years of work, from the
moment of his first exhibition in New York in the
late 1940s his contribution to modern art only grew.
Practicing in the tradition of the ‘‘straight’’ photo-
graphers he is associated with New York School
Painting and his subject matter is reminiscent of
the surfaces of a painting by Franz Kline or Clyf-
ford Still. Rather than taking traditional subject
matter as his central concern, Siskind often focused
his camera on a wall and engaged with the picture
plane. Geometrical forms and flat planes became
his object of study. Although he produced well-
known images such as Terrors and Pleasure of
Levitation(1954) and facades of Chicago streets,
Mexican pyramids, and abstract designs on walls in
Rome, he is relatively unknown compared to other
photographers of his time. Yet his impact was
great. A radical by nature, his work did for photo-
graphy what abstract expressionists such as Kline
and de Kooning did for their own medium. In
addition he was a great teacher who was in resi-
dence at the Chicago Institute of Design alongside
Harry Callahan in the 1950s–1970s and later went
on to the Rhode Island School of Design.
Minor White was perhaps the most influential
photographer of these three men and of the postwar
era. Having worked for the Works Progress Admin-
istration (WPA) during the Great Depression, White
is remembered for his haunting images of the natural
world but also as one of the founding members of
Aperturequarterly and as a great teacher who helped
advance the careers of many burgeoning artists.
White’s meticulous ‘‘straight’’ photographic style
wasformedduringhisexchangeswithsuchmasters
of the prewar era as Edward Weston, Alfred Stie-
glitz, and Ansel Adams. His conversations with Stie-
glitz, in particular, spurred his ‘‘meditations’’ about
photography as a way to translate visual form into
something he called the ‘‘suprasensual.’’ For White,
the photograph was a ‘‘mirage’’ and the camera was
a ‘‘metamorphosing machine.’’
To get from the tangible to the intangible...a paradox of
some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photo-
grapher to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts
upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only
possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique
photography is to work ‘‘the mirror with a memory’’ as
if it were a mirage, and the camera a metamorphosing
machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor....
Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, sub-
stance and form can use the same to pursue poetic truth.White developed the theory of the ‘‘accidental,’’
and his essayFound Photographyis a profound
description not only of his approach, but of his
spiritual process. While he saw photography as
something sacred and spiritual, White was also a
master technician which just added to the exquisite-
ness of his craft. Photographs such asPacific, Dev-
ils Slide, California, 1947 and the stunningly
majesticBarn and Clouds, In the Vicinity of Naples
and Dansville, NY, 1955are perhaps some of the
most outstanding illustrations of his aesthetic the-
ory in practice.
Apart from Minor White, Swiss-born photogra-
pher Robert Frank is probably the most influential
of the postwar era. Unlike the abstract planes of
Siskind or the intimate familial portraits of Call-
ahan, Frank’s work framed the mundane moments
of loneliness, boredom, racial strife, and the banal,
everyday life of America in the 1950s. On his arri-HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: POSTWAR ERA