I made a quick trip up to Boston last week specifically to see this exhibition of Harry Callahan’s photographs. It was only just over a year ago that his work began to make a lasting impression on me and so strong is that impression that I think no trip to see his work is too far afield. When planning the trip it seemed serendipitous that the museum was also showing the work of Melendez, a painter who’s work I have long enjoyed. As it turned out, seeing the two exhibitions together has helped me more clearly define the difference between painting and photography.
When we look at a painting we have a dual perception: a perception of the surface and a perception of depth created on the surface. While there is no deep picture space in Melendez’ still lifes, in the shallow space he created there is nonetheless an almost palpable sense of three dimensions. By contrast, despite the photographer’s ability to capture aerial and linear perspective, to control depth of field, and to play soft focus against hard edges, when we look at a photograph we have only a perception of surface. This comes from the fact that the camera makes its record with but one eye.
I was also reminded once again of Cezanne’s work. Cezanne was one of the first painters to make the painting an object in and of itself. At the time Cezanne was painting photography was coming into its own and many painters were asking: what can painting do that photography cannot. For Cezanne the answer was the interplay between the two perceptions and especially the finish of the surface. Because a Harry Callahan photograph is also presented as an object in and of itself I believe he must have asked: what can photography do that painting cannot. Knowing that he worked with Moholy Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes I think it is a safe surmise that he was interested in creating patterns with light and shadow on a neutral surface. Thus in his photographs he is not expressing his feelings about the subject but his fascination with the possibilities of the medium. (Again this is distinct from Ansel Adams’ slavish devotion to photographic technique.) But where Moholy Nagy was concerned only with the formal values, Harry Callahan added a deeper and more human context to his work.
One positive aspect of this exhibition is the opportunity to see the photographs in the sizes that the photographer chose to make them. I am a firm believer that a photograph has a correct size and that the photographer is the one who makes that determination. The most common size here is about 8 by 10, there are some at about 5 by 7, and there are many that are cropped within those two sizes…4 by 4, 6 by 6, 8 by 8, etc. There are only one or two that are larger, no more than 11 by 14, and there are two that are about 2 by 3 inches. I believe Harry Callahan most often worked with 35mm film and so I think we can deduce from his small prints that he wanted the sharpest possible images.
There is no texture to his paper, it is value free. From what I could ascertain every one was printed on a similar paper. The prints are neither glossy nor matte, somewhat like what we used to call double weight but without the texture of that paper. All of the black and white photographs are silver gelatin prints and the few color photographs are dye transfer. Perhaps some day in the near future museums will include more technical data in their photography exhibitions: if exhibitions are intended to inspire they should inspire through a discussion of materials and techniques as well as through results.
One of the amusing aspects of Callahan’s work is that he made it almost impossible to discuss his work without the example under discussion close at hand. This is a result of his choice of titles. In this exhibition we see Eleanor, 1949, Eleanor 1949, and Eleanor 1949. Others are Chicago 1949, Chicago 1949, and Chicago 1949. But despite his predilection for patterns and his choice of anonymity of subject one insight that does assert itself in his work is his love of women, not in the sense of his carousing or wanting to carouse but in his view of the feminine as mythic and essential.
There are ten Eleanor photographs in the exhibition. Eleanor was his wife. In many of the photographs she is nude. One of the photographs that makes the strongest impression is Eleanor, 1949, in which she is in the water with only her head and shoulders exposed. Her long hair streams on the surface. Her breast is seen through the water beneath the surface. Her eyes are down cast or closed. Even as a cipher without affect she is extremely feminine. The photograph is so unusual and so strong, it is one of his most iconic images, that she can only be understood as his muse. And so, through this series of photographs, Eleanor does become The Muse.
From his series of photographs taken on the street without the passers by knowing what he was doing, (all of them here are women …and each rigidly in control of her social persona), we can note again a consistent fascination with their femininity. But this can be felt as well in his Cape Cod 1974. In this we see the beach below and the sky above, a study of two grays. But the contour line of the horizon dips down in the center and beyond there is the very slightest indication of a very thin, dark slit of sea. Regardless of our prior associations with the textures presented, this becomes a very sensuous and feminine presence.
One element that I also see in Callahan’s work, but which I could not study here because there were so few prints that presented the opportunity, is his tendency to make photographs that reference snapshots. That has to do with commonplace subjects and settings but with a reconfigured composition. The one photograph here that illustrates my perception is Eleanor and Barbara, 1953, in which a woman and her daughter stand on a brick roadway in front of an architectural composition. Callahan has placed them too far back into the composition for this to be a Sunday afternoon memento, but they are too forward facing to be simply incidental. There is a darkness overall as if the negative had been underexposed. I see this approach consistently in his work and in a more comprehensive exhibition I think one could spend more time developing an understanding of that aspect of his work.
The photographs are from the museum collection and from several private collectors …future benefactors we might suppose. My favorite of his photographs, Chicago, 1949, the black trees silhouetted against the gray Lake Michigan, is from the Lane Collection. (…which doesn’t surprise me: The Lane Collection is one of the finest collections of modern American art and is resident at this museum. Almost all of those artists are from the Alfred Stieglitz gallery.) The Bank of America Collection, formerly the La Salle Bank Collection; see this blog, December, 2008, has loaned all of the photographs made with multiple exposures. I think it is safe to assume that the museum has none of that series in their collection. Because Harry Callahan is one of America’s very best and most American photographers, let’s hope the benefactors make haste and step to the plate: so little of his work is on the market that the prices are not likely to go down. Their refusal to be generous, however, might have something to do with the presentation in this exhibition space, see The Herb Ritts Gallery below.
With all of the difficulties of this exhibition space in mind and considering the very high quality of the reproductions of his work in the book, Harry Callahan, the Photographer at Work, see this blog January, 2009, I believe one has a better opportunity to study and know his work through the book than in this exhibition. While this exhibition covers many years of his career it has more the nature of a sampler than of a comprehensive overview.
On the page below the link to art tattler has some of his photos as well as some of the Melendez paintings.
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=8636
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