Prints and Multiples

Lot Note:

Harry Callahan

Harry Callahan’s groundbreaking experimentation; emphasis on his personal life experiences, human relationships, and Modernist principles; and championing of photography in his role as an educator places him as one of the most foundational photographers of the twentieth century.

Born in Detroit in 1912, following college Callahan began to work for General Motors, where he joined the Chrysler Camera Club in 1938 as a hobby, buying his first camera. Self-taught, he began to pursue photography more seriously following a 1941 workshop and lecture by Ansel Adams. Following time spent in New York in 1945, where he interacted with several influential photographers like Helen Levitt, Paul Strand, and Berenice Abbott, Callahan moved to Chicago in 1946 to teach photography at The New Bauhaus—the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The school, started by László Moholy-Nagy in 1937, emphasized Modernist and Bauhaus values about the importance of integrating design and everyday life as well as a focus on experimentation. Teaching alongside Aaron Siskind, Callahan was a pioneer of experimental techniques in the dark room, embracing the use of double and triple exposures, heavy contrasts, collage, and blurring to achieve impressive and often abstract effects. Callahan also emphasized the importance of drawing from personal experience and human connection. His muses throughout his career were his wife, Eleanor, and his daughter, Barbara. He would also comb the cities in which he lived for candid shots, expertly adapting his shutter speed and exposure to meet the challenge of capturing his moving subjects in real time without losing the depth of his subjects’ intensity and emotion.

In 1961, Callahan was invited to begin a photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design, which he chaired until 1975. From his many contributions to the medium, Callahan was chosen as the first photographer to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1978.

This exciting example from 1949 offered here of Callahan’s wife Eleanor particularly illustrates his innovative working methods and fastidious pursuit of perfection.