his method was to teach by example, and with very
few, well-chosen words.
As some of the original faculty, like Frank Levstik
and Frank Sokolik, departed in the late 1940s, Call-
ahan and Siegel filled their posts with a variety of
part-time teachers. Gordon Coster, Ferenc Berko,
and Wayne Miller all taught at the school during
this period, and were especially valued for their doc-
umentary experience and classes. Students increas-
ingly were taking their cameras out into the city,
away from the studio and its controlled experimen-
tation, and found Chicago rich in subject matter;
student pictures from this period often focus on
children, local architecture, and street scenes. One
of the first four-year photography students in 1946
was Art Sinsabaugh, who graduated from the pro-
gram in 1949; upon graduation, he was hired by
Callahan to teach, and eventually ran the evening
photography program through 1959. His early reti-
culated and solarized pictures, then still typical of ID
student work, could not have predicted his later
long, narrow prairie landscapes made with a banquet
camera. Another student of Callahan’s was Yasu-
hiro Ishimoto, who attended from 1948 to 1952.
Although Callahan did not show his own photo-
graphs to students at that point, his influence was
profound, and can still be felt in Ishimoto’s compas-
sionate portraits of children on Maxwell Street or
pictures of cars in snow.
In 1949, two important changes occurred: Siegel
resigned from the faculty at the Institute of Design,
leaving Callahan to become the head of the photo-
graphy department, and the ID, ever short of funds
and needing greater support, merged with the Illi-
nois Institute of Technology. In merging with IIT,
the ID gained institutional backing but lost some of
its independence. Although Siegel would return to
teach sporadically throughout the 1950s, his
absence was felt, and Callahan knew he needed
another strong personality to help him direct the
photography program. He made an inspired
choice, one that would mark the beginning of a
teaching team so complementary and influential
as to be legendary in photographic education: in
1951, he hired Aaron Siskind.
At the time, Siskind was living in New York,
where he had gained a significant reputation in
art circles as a photographer. Originally a tea-
cher—he taught English for 21 years in New
York’s public schools—he had only recently taken
up photography full-time, and was trying to find a
way to support himself and continue his photo-
graphic career. He was also a close associate of
the Abstract Expressionists, and often exhibited
with them; his photographs of painted and graf-
fiti-covered walls shared a similar two-dimensional
formalism. The wall pictures were something of a
departure for Siskind, however, whose initial inter-
est in photography had been directed toward his
political activism. Throughout the 1930s, he had
been a member of the leftist Film and Photo Lea-
gue, where he oversaw group documentary projects
such as ‘‘Portrait of a Tenement’’ and ‘‘Harlem
Document.’’ In Chicago, he continued his work
on painted and graffiti-covered walls, and docu-
mented Chicago’s architecture and urban facades
as well as leading students in more socially-oriented
projects. One of his most memorable series from
the period is ‘‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation,’’
an extensive series of divers at the Oak Street
Beach, their figures silhouetted against the white
sky like a new alphabet.
Siskind was in many ways Callahan’s opposite:
where Callahan was shy and found teaching at
times agonizing, Siskind was a natural teacher, his
years in the city schools having accustomed him to
speaking in front of a group. Callahan remained
devoted to his wife, Eleanor, throughout his life,
whereas Siskind married several times and was a
notorious womanizer. Callahan was quiet but cen-
tered, Siskind gregarious and outspoken. Some-
how, though, the two formed an extremely
compatible and effective team, and students recall
them as almost a single entity. (Although there
were other photography teachers sporadically at
the ID in the 1950s—among them, Lyle Mayer,
Keld Helmer-Peterson, Arthur Siegel, and, when
Callahan was on leave in France during the 1957–
1958 academic year, Frederick Sommer—Callahan
and Siskind were the leaders of the program.) Call-
ahan gravitated toward the beginning students,
teaching them the foundation problems, and Sis-
kind gradually took on the more advanced stu-
dents, guiding their individual projects. When the
graduate program began, both men met with the
students to advise them on their master’s theses.
Together Callahan and Siskind shaped the new
undergraduate curriculum. Callahan increasingly
emphasized working in series, so students could
follow an idea in a sustained manner; this would
eventually lead to the master’s thesis. Siskind devel-
oped some new assignments to add to the evolving
batch from the school’s early days. The ‘‘copy pro-
blem,’’ in which students attempted to duplicate
exactly the tones of another print, taught technical
skills, while his ‘‘significant form’’ problem sent
students to Chicago’s conservatories to photo-
graph plants in distilled form. But it was Siskind’s
experience on group documentary projects that
would have some of the most impact in the 1950s.INSTITUTE OF DESIGN