The Book. Harry Callahan:The Photographer at Work. The Center for Creative Photography

After my discovery of the work of Harry Callahan in Chicago last month I decided to do some further research of his life and work…the weather being too cold, at minus 15, to go out to see any museums or exhibitions this month. For the sake of title compression I have indicated the book listed above, but as well I have read The Archive Series Number 28, Harry Callahan, Early Street Photography, and Number 35, Harry Callahan, Variations on a Theme. All three of these books have been published by The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. It is interesting, and I think it excuses my prior ignorance of the man’s work, that in his preface to Archive 35, Peter Schjeldahl remarks: “I can’t think of another photographer on Callahan’s level who is less well known.”

While reading the books I became aware that in his life and work there is a convergence of two of my life long interests: Cezanne and Camus. This is not to suggest that Callahan shared my interest in those two artists, but that my understanding of his work proceeds from my understanding of their work.

Cezanne had a passion to paint and in his early years his energy far exceeded his mastery of craft. It was not until Pissarro slowed him down and taught him the rudiments of Impressionism that the man began to look at a canvas in a different way. But having completed a few paintings in that style, he was dissatisfied with it and moved on to a new area. Late in his life when fellow painters would go down to Provence to visit him and to paint with him, they would find crumpled in the underbrush paintings that had not met with his approval and which he had thrown away.

For many years I wondered why those paintings did not please him and why others did. Considering that his paintings were so different from what was being done I began to ask: what was his reference? What was he attempting to do? Slowly I have come to understand that he did not consider the format a window, one did not look “into” the paintings to see “something”, nor were they about the subject, the subject was simply a motif, a reason for making a painting. Finally, about a year ago, and this was after twenty years of hard looking, I came face to face with one of his Jas du Bouffan landscapes at MOMA and immediately I was struck by its tremendous “presence”. Suddenly I understood that it was the “presence” of the painting that made of it an object in and of itself and that in his paintings he was reconciling that surface presence with the tendency of a painting to drop into deep picture space: he was balancing that tension.

This means that I disagree with Meyer Shapiro who attempted to persuade us, in his essay The Apples of Cezanne, that the apple paintings are about apples and spring from their mythic symbolism for Cezanne. They are not about apples. They are paintings about painting. Every painter is trained, either in a school, as an apprentice, or self taught. When he paints he paints to please his mentors. If he has a client, he paints to please the client. But before he can please any of the above, he must paint to please himself: hence, first and foremost all painting is about painting. Great paintings are a dialogue with and about painting. In modern art …see Cezanne …see Picasso.

In his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes for us the absurd moment, a moment when each of us steps outside the time in which we live and comes face to face with the comprehension that the universe is without meaning or purpose, it is absurd, and we then realize, if only fleetingly, that we too are without meaning and purpose: ours is an absurd existence. Once having admitted the possibility of absurdity we can no longer deny it. But rather than using that insight to justify suicide, Camus encourages us to make the work of our lives meaningful to ourselves, and, by inference, as members of a social organism, meaningful to the race. In his view, the right path is outside our common tendency to take the easier way …conformity, which he views as a denial of our true state.

In reading about the life and work of Harry Callahan I was reminded over and over again of those two artists. Early in his life, in the mid 1930’s, in Detroit, Callahan took up photography and joined a local camera club…a cultural artifact of the era. But he was uninspired by the work of the other members and by the then dictates of the art. His contact with guest workshop host, Ansel Adams, altered his understanding of photography…and of what made a life significant. He said: “It gave me the freedom to make pictures my way.” There followed a period in which he strictly adhered to the Adams principles but eventually he threw that over in order to really make pictures his way.

From the time that he bought his first camera, Harry Callahan said that he only wanted make photographs. Throughout his life he went out every morning and shot three or four rolls of film. He spent the afternoons developing and making contact sheets. (By his estimate he made five or six good photographs a year …that should certainly encourage the rest of us!) For thirty one years he also taught photography in Chicago, at Black Mountain, and then at The Rhode Island School of Design. His graduate students would gather weekly in his living room for discussions about photography. Indeed, as his wife has attested, his life was about photography. When it is stated in the books that he had a loss of religious faith as a young man, it seemed to me that this consuming occupation could be understood as an indication of his glimpse of the absurd moment, and that he was not hiding or cowering from that insight but embracing it. I am reminded in this of Susanne Langer’s comment regarding our need for symbolic experience and that it is satisfied in magic and ritual, religion and art. Clearly, for Harry Callahan, fine art photography was the entryway to symbolic experience.

In discussing his work, and he was apparently a man of few words, the words he used being sufficient in his opinion, he often used the term “intuition”. The Photographer at Work has a good long section in which the author, Britt Salvesen, defines what Callahan might have meant by intuition. But whatever he did mean when he went out to photograph he went out to see what was there not to find something preconceived that he was looking for although he did work in specific areas and he maintained an interest in those areas all his life, for instance his people on the street photographs from Detroit in the 40’s, in Chicago in the 50’s and in Providence in the 60’s. He also worked with landscape, cityscapes and buildings, female nudes, (his wife), and many, many photographs of his wife and daughter. In his continual return to the same subject matter, I am reminded of Cezanne’s similar return, in the apple paintings, Mont Sainte Victoire, Mme Cezanne, and I think I see in the photographs the same thing I see in the painter’s canvasses: the subject is simply the motif for making a photograph; first and foremost his photographs are about photography and in the work of both artists there can be seen a life long development to clearer understanding and comprehension of what they are doing over the long number of years.

But Callahan’s works are not about photography in the way that Ansel Adams photographs were about photography. Adams kept his eye open for the “found” photograph and once having found it he set up his equipment and exposed the plates all the while making copious notes which he then followed rigorously in the darkroom. When his works were reproduced in books he was very specific about the reproduction methods he would allow.

By contrast, for Callahan a photograph was an art work that had the quality of being reproducible. He felt that anyone should be able to make prints from his negatives. He felt it was his obligation to make a negative through which that would be possible. This is not to say that he never manipulated the process during the printing. In the book there are several photographs that show both the contact sheet print and the photograph Callahan made from that negative: there is a difference. But the basic difference between the two photographers is that for Adams the technique of making photographs was paramount and for Callahan making a photograph was his primary interest.

As a result of his interest Callahan’s photographs can be understood as explorations of the possibilities for making art through the use of the plastic elements of photography; line, form and light. That they are or might be or need to be “about” something seems beside the point.

At the exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center I saw the photograph, Chicago, 1950: there is a band of white snow across the bottom, the ground is two very near shades of gray…the sky and the lake, and silhouetted over it are six trees in crisp black silhouette. Very likely I have seen thousands of photographs very similar to this one but seeing that print face to face I was awe struck by the simplicity, by the perfection of the composition, and by the magnificence of this photograph. That work is beautifully reproduced in the book and on the facing page there is a photographic negative of the same work. As a purely visual experience this does not need to be “about” something, it is and that it exists is sufficient.

That Harry Callahan worked every day and that he made photography his life does not at all imply that he shared the obsessive compulsive energy of the outsider artist. For him this was an expression of his Midwestern work ethic. But, again, I think it also relates him to the thinking of Albert Camus: the work filled the void of a man conscious of being alone (in the company of his family and friends) in the universe. From the comments in all three of these books and especially from his colleagues I have the sense of a man who was very much alone, on his own, his own man, and somewhat apart from the world around him. I have no problem with that…he made magnificent photographs. That aloofness could also have been a very Midwestern trait as well. But our pleasure in seeing his work and sharing his vision brings us out of our isolation and into communion with him: through his strong presence in his work we find the warmth of fellowship and the joy of seeing with new eyes.

Harry Callahan, The Photography at Work was the accompanying catalogue for the exhibit at The Center in early 2006. (I had visited the Center in late 2005: sorry I just missed this one.) The book seems to me to be an essential source for becoming familiar with the artist and his works. In addition to a really fine essay by Salvesen there are 20 photographs in color and 227 in black and white. The quality of the reproductions is superb. Rounding it off there is a bibliography, and a section on the Harry Callahan archives: The Center is the home for those archives. Yale University Press is the publisher.

The Archives 28, Harry Callahan Early Street Photography 1943-1945, (1990), is a 44 page monograph written by John Pultz and includes a 24 page portfolio of prints in the size and as originally oriented on the pages by Harry Callahan. While this book is available from the Center at $19.95, in doing my research on the internet I found a copy of it available at Amazon.com at $250.00. Buyer beware!

The Archives 35 Harry Callahan Variations on a Theme, 2007, is a published version of the symposium that was held during the 2006 exhibition at the Center. Those participating were friends, colleagues, former students, and his wife Eleanor and his daughter Barbara. All of the information is first hand oral history. In addition to many beautiful prints there is a wealth of information in this book.

Once home from Chicago I went through my collection of books on photography and found that I had indeed seen the work of Mr. Callahan in several of them. One book I can especially recommend is Master Photographers, a series of interviews with many mid twentieth century artists discussing their techniques and with a small portfolio of prints representing each photographer. The editor is Pat Booth. Clarkson N. Potter, Publishers, 1983. The Callahan chapter is excellent. I’m sorry I had forgotten that I had read it. But I think that illustrates the value of seeing art works face to face: while the recipe might be appetizing, the proof is in the pudding.