My Mentor

Harry Callahan

Born in Detroit, Michigan on October of 1912 was an American photographer who is considered to be one of the greatest innovators of modern American photography and one of the most influential  and unique photographers of the twentieth century. Harry Callahan helped bring photography into the art world and helped to make it mainstream. Callahan was one of the few photographers who worked excellent in colour as he did in black and white.

Harry Callahan grew up in the suburb of Royal Oak, where he went to public school and graduated. His parents were farmers who moved to Detroit so they could find work in the auto industry while Callahan attended Michigan State College for three semesters and studied engineering. He left school in 1933 and got a job as a shipping clerk with Chrysler Parts Corporation. The same year, Harry Callahan met Eleanor Knapp, his future wife. They actually met on a blind date and married three years later. He considered this one of the two great events that has ever happened to him in his whole life; the other being the purchase of his first camera in 1983. When he dentist showed him a movie camera, he wanted to buy one but they were too expensive so he bought a Rolleicord still camera instead.

Callahan joined the company’s camera club and, by 1938, Callahan had begun to teach himself about photography. He began taking pictures as a hobby and he later joined the Detroit Photo Guild. He had no formal training as a photographer except for a few workshops. According to his own writings, Callahan was a terrifically naïve person which he considered to be his great strength. He thought that because he didn’t have any training on photography that he had “fresh eyes”.  Callahan’s first photographs were very small, often the size of a postcard.

During this time, Callahan became friends with another future photographer, Todd Webb. Callahan’s method of photography was very technical and precise. Every day he would wake up and walk in the city where he lived and took photographs. After his long mornings of taking photographs he would look over his negatives in the afternoon and choose the best ones to make prints. He wrote that photography was an adventure just like his life was an adventure. When Ansel Adams, another beautiful photographer, gave Callahan a workshop in 1941 at the Detroit Photo Guild, he was really impressed with the examples of his work that he shared. Although Callahan liked all of Adam’s work, he was mostly interested in the close-ups of plants and the ground. This was a turning point in Callahan’s life, he believe that he was an artist with a camera. He left the Detroit Photo Guild shortly after this turning point in his life, believing that photography clubs were too limiting. Just like Ansel Adams, Callahan began using a huge view camera loaded with 8-by 10 inch negatives that he could print by laying them directly on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light. He was totally self-motivated, extremely curious about technique, and continually willing to try new approaches. He worked with extreme contrast, collage, multiple and time exposures, camera motion, and unique lighting which made his photos extremely beautiful.

Callahan realized that his urban background influenced the subjects he chose. He chose small things like tree branches and set them against big cityscapes. He met Alfred Stieglitz in 1942, but did not want to show Alfred any of his own work. After viewing Stieglitz photographs of his wife, Callahan began taking many intimate pictures of his wife Eleanor. During this period, he took some of his most enduring pictures, held his first exhibit, and saw that his photographs were on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time Callahan had left his position with General Motors and needed a job to support his family. Laszlo Moholy-Nag, an abstractionist, saw Callahan's portfolio and hired him to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1946, which became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949 where he remained until 1961.

In 1950, his daughter, Barbara, was born. Even prior to her birth, Callahan photographed Eleanor pregnant with their future child. The family found an apartment in the ballroom of an old mansion in Chicago on the north. In his new apartment, he set up a darkroom and began printing in the kitchen sink. His first prints sold for five dollars each. The Institute of Design was considered to be somewhat unorthodox. It was one of the few colleges that included photography as an academic discipline. Photographers concentrated on personal themes, nature studies, and abstractions. An analysis of Callahan's style in Contemporary Photographers concluded that "...his photographs can be viewed as a lifelong challenge to the camera's eye, a series of never ending questions on the nature of the medium itself."

Subjects from his everyday life were Callahan’s choice throughout most of his career. From 1948 to 1952, Eleanor, and sometimes Barbara, were shown out in the landscape as a tiny part of the photograph compared to a large area of parks, skyline or water even in the streets, scenes and buildings of cities where he lived. Even though they are small parts of the photo and may seem insignificant, they still dominate the viewer’s perception. His work showed a strong sense of line and form, and light and darkness. He photographed Eleanor everywhere; alone, with their daughter, in black and white and in colour, nude and clothed, distant and close. His wife was ESSENTIAL to his photography. Callahan was married to the same woman all of his adult life and was devoted to his family.

He was one of the first photographers to earn a successful living in the profession. Callahan was considered to be an excellent teacher. The Institute of Design was one of only two schools granting degrees in photography when Callahan began teaching. Many of his students took university jobs throughout the United States, spreading to others how influential their teacher was. He also worked with multiple exposures and his work was a deep personal response to his own life. It was also personally oriented. Many of his pictures artistically interpret his family relationships. His early work experimented with abstract landscapes, body form, etc and his later work in colour included additional subject matter which is stated earlier in this paragraph. He tried every technical experiment- double and triple exposure, blurs, large camera and small.  

Callahan received the National Medal of Arts in 1996 then he died of cancer in Atlanta, Georgia on March, 1999. He left behind a HUGE body or work. The Callahan archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. It contains approximately 20000 print, 5000 slides and 100000 negatives.

The photo I took of my friend, a girl, (photo below) mimics one of Callahan’s photos somewhat because of its simplicity, elegance and detail. I believe that the simplicity of this photo is what makes it so beautiful, so strong and elegant, it leaves many thoughts and feelings when looked at which is what Harry Callahan’s photos did for me. The simplicity and preciseness of every single one of his photographs and the clarity made them so beautiful. The photo taken by me to mimic Callahan is similar to his work because it has a women's hands in it and Callahan photographed mainly his wife, and sometimes his daughter. The bare skin of his wife was a big part of his art too so I decided that photographing a naked arm and making it simple would reflect Callahan’s work greatly. Before I took the photo I thought of the way Callahan uses his techniques in his photos. Since his photos shows a strong sense of light and darkness I made the photo be very dark but light at the same time.

Hands