HARRY CALLAHAN
American
Harry Callahan joined the premier ranks of Amer-
ican photographers almost from the beginning of
his career in the mid 1940s. By the time he was
included in the popular 1955 exhibitionThe Family
of Manat the Museum of Modern Art, New York
(MoMA), his restless experimentation, always at
the service of capturing the human and natural
landscape and presenting it to further his values
and expressive purposes, had made him one of the
most important figures in twentieth-century photo-
graphy. No matter his subject—and most often it
was the stuff of ordinary life—Callahan infused his
photographs with emotion and quiet elegance. He
was also eloquent in speaking of his vision:
You must start with a concept, with the idea that there is
much more to the subject than meets the unaided eye.
The subject is all-important. And I experiment with var-
ious techniques to help me see things differently from
the way I saw them before. That is seeing photographi-
cally, and when you see photographically, you really
see.
(Greenough 184)
Born in Detroit in 1912 to a middle-class family,
Callahan studied chemical engineering and then
business at Michigan State College from 1934 to
- After completing his formal education, he
worked as a shipping clerk for the Chrysler
Motor Parts Corporation. In 1936, he married
Eleanor Knapp, who would later serve as the sub-
ject of many of his most enduring photographs. It
was about this time that Callahan developed an
interest in photography through a photo club at
his workplace; he purchased his first camera, a
Rolleicord 120, in 1938. After attending a 1941
Detroit Photo Guild workshop taught by the land-
scape photographer Ansel Adams, Callahan began
to devote himself seriously to photography. During
1944–1945, he worked as a processor in the Gen-
eral Motors Corporation photo lab.
Aside from his attendance of photo club lectures,
Callahan was self-taught. A seminal episode in this
education was a 1945 trip to New York that he
described as a ‘‘personal fellowship’’ where he met
many of the established photographers—including
Lisette Model, Berenice Abbott, Minor White, and
Paul Strand—and art curators of the day. Two
major career developments occurred in the late
1940s: in 1946, he was hired by La ́szlo ́ Moholy-
Nagy, then director of the ‘‘New Bauhaus’’—the
Institute of Design (ID) in Chicago—as an instruc-
tor in photography; and he began his long friend-
ship with Edward Steichen, director of the
department of photography at MoMA. Callahan
was included in numerous group and solo exhibi-
tions at MoMA in the 1940s and 1950s, introducing
his work widely to the photography community.
Relocating to Chicago from Detroit in 1946,
Callahan spent the next 15 years teaching at ID
and shooting some of his best-known photographs.
He served as head of ID’s Light Workshop (the
photography department) beginning in 1949, after
the resignation of his old Detroit Camera Club
colleague Arthur Siegel. He held this position
until 1961, when he left Chicago to assume the
chairmanship of the photography department of
the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Pro-
vidence. He held this position until 1973, although
he stayed on as a professor until 1977.
Callahan was an influential instructor and a role
model for countless students, many of whom would
become important photographers in their own
right, including Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Kenneth
Josephson. His personal innovations and experi-
mentations had a deep impact on ID’s photogra-
phy program, and his legacy to this now-legendary
institution included hiring Aaron Siskind in 1951.
Although the Bauhaus curriculum at ID empha-
sized the study of light (which Callahan expressed
in photographs that featured tracings of a flash-
light beam created by moving his camera), his
assignments often included projects that took his
students into the streets of Chicago to record the
interaction of architecture and the human figure
with the raking light and shadows the urban infra-
structure could create. Candid studies of people
going about their business, their anonymity para-
doxically revelatory, were typical of both Calla-
han and his ID students and have formed a
school of photography celebrated in such exhi-CALLAHAN, HARRY