Harry Callahan

Harry Callahan is known for his deeply personal and experimental style of photography, breaking away from the documentation approach that was prevalent in the mid-century canon. Born in Detroit, in 1912, Callahan began his photography career in the late 1930s, primarily as a self-taught artist. Over time, he became one of the most respected photographers of the 20th century, renowned for his ability to transform everyday scenes into poetic, abstract compositions.

Callahan’s work often revolved around two main subjects: the city and his family. His wife Eleanor, and later their daughter Barbara, were frequent subjects of his portraits. The series ‘Eleanor and Barbara’, undertaken during Callahan’s years of teaching on László Moholy-Nagy’s invitation at the New Bauhaus in Chicago (now known as the Institute of Design) between 1946 and 1961, captured intimate, tender moments of domestic life while exploring light, shadow and form. Featuring casual snapshots with the intense clarity and sense of scale of an 8 x 10 camera, this series showcases Callahan’s ability to balance the personal with the formal and abstract helped elevate these photographs into iconic works of art.

The photographer left Chicago in 1961 to head the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design. As an educator, Callahan fostered a new generation of important young American photographers, including Ray K. Metzker, Emmet Gowin, Kenneth Josephson and Bill Burke.

Callahan had a prolific practice, shooting dozens of photographs a day, working in both black-and-white and colour. ‘Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure,’ he said. ‘If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life. I am interested in relating the problems that affect me to some set of values that I am trying to discover and establish as being my life. I want to discover and establish them through photography.’ He was known to use a 35-millimeter and an 8 x 10 camera with multiple exposures, as what Moholy-Nagy called ‘simultaneous seeing’, as well as straight compositions.

Throughout his lifetime, Callahan was widely acclaimed and respected. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972, International Center of Photography’s Master of Photography Infinity Award in 1991 and other accolades. Harry Callahan died in 1999, aged 86. Today, his works belong in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago and more.