bitions asLight and Vision: Photography at the
School of Designand When Aaron Met Harry:
Chicago Photography 1946–1971. Callahan’s fa-
mous 1950 series of close-ups of anonymous
women shoppers in Chicago began a strain of
photography that captured average people and
celebrated their individuality; Lee Friedlander and
Garry Winogrand perfected this style in the 1960s
and 1970s, and it is sustained into the new century
by photographers such as Beat Struli.
During Callahan’s short formative period, he was
influenced by the intimate and contemplative nature
studies by Adams; the European Modernism exem-
plified by the Hungarian Moholy-Nagy; and the
aesthetic purity of Alfred Stieglitz, the legendary
photographer and curator. By the late 1940s, Call-
ahan had forged a style of his own at the service of a
clearly articulated goal, which was to be able to
express his life and his observations about life
through his photography. Thus, it is not surprising
that prevalent in Callahan’s work are elegant por-
traits of his wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara, who
was born in 1950. These posed yet strikingly intimate
works include views of Eleanor in the streets of
Chicago, such asEleanor, Chicago, 1953,andthe
iconic studies of Eleanor nude in the confines of the
domestic interior, such asEleanor, Chicago, 1948,
and his 8-inch by 10-inch view camera ‘‘snapshots’’
of Eleanor and Barbara going about their daily lives.
At the same time, Callahan continued the tradition
of Moholy-Nagy in his formalism and experimenta-
tion with the photographic medium, although, rather
paradoxically, these photographs also are intense
and highly personal. Many of his experiments
involve layered images, distortion, or manipulations
of focus and contrast, such as Collage, Chicago,
1957 , which features hundreds of clippings from
magazines. Callahan had known the architect Mies
van der Rohe when they were on the ID faculty
together, and van der Rohe’s predilections for sim-
plified form that was also generalized and abstract
mirrored his own. Influenced by van der Rohe, Call-
ahan created a series of multiple exposures of archi-
tectural subjects typified byChicago(ca. 1948).
Throughout his career, Callahan photographed
the natural landscape, including brooding, Minim-
alist beach scenes taken in Cape Cod, Massachu-
setts, and textural nature studies of leaves, grasses,
tree branches, and twigs, such as the elegantly
minimal studies of plant stems against a white
background, such asDetroit(ca. 1947), which mi-
mics the creases and lines of the nude female body
ofEleanor(1947). These works have a strong sense
of abstraction, and taken together with his more
experimental multiple-exposure photographs, show
his familiarity with painterly issues and the influ-
ence of painter friends and colleagues such as Hugo
Weber (a fellow ID teacher) and Robert Mother-
well, whom he met when he taught a summer ses-
sion at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Although he is often thought of as a photogra-
pher of the figure or the cityscape and landscape,
Callahan also dealt with popular culture and the
mass media. Some of his earliest work photo-
graphed neon signs, transforming them with cam-
era movements into expressive bursts of light.
Especially in the 1960s, perhaps reacting to the
general climate of sweeping social and political
change in the United States, Callahan focused on
cultural imagery, superimposing images taken from
television with images of pedestrians, which con-
trasted the powerful, carefully constructed media
images with the mundane reality of everyday life.
This strain in Callahan’s work, although not as
well known, prefigures much of the ‘‘image scaveng-
ing,’’ or appropriation, practiced by many artists of
the 1980s to the turn of the century, including Bar-
bara Kruger and Richard Prince.
Although Callahan experimented with color
from the beginning of his career, his photographs
of the 1950s and 1960s were generally in black and
white; color came to the fore in 1977 in architec-
tural and landscape studies that featured intense,
yet low-key, color. Callahan continued his photo-
graphic explorations throughout his long career,
returning in the 1990s to subjects that he first
explored in the 1950s: landscape and street scenes
featuring raking light that abstracts the image.
Callahan was influenced by his travels, including
a year-long trip to Europe in 1957, which was
funded by a grant from the Graham Foundation.
This sojourn in Aix-en-Provence, France, produced
his well-known works of double-exposure images
of Eleanor and the landscape of Provence. A 1963
trip to Mexico was followed by extensive travels in
Europe, South America, the South Pacific, Austra-
lia, New Zealand, Japan, and China. He was
honored with a retrospective at MoMA in 1976
and a traveling retrospective organized by the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in- His photographs have been exhibited inter-
nationally and are included in the collections of
virtually every photography museum and photo-
graphy department within general museums. A
variety of magazines published his photographs,
includingLife, Newsweek, The New York Times
andThe Chicago Tribunemagazines,U.S. Camera,
Aperture, andHarper’s Bazaar.
LYNNEWarren
CALLAHAN, HARRY