Background
Harry Callahan was born on the 22nd of October, 1912 in Detroit, Michigan, United States.
(Harry Callahan was one of the most respected and influent...)
Harry Callahan was one of the most respected and influential American photographers of the modern era. He was a master of traditional genres such as portraiture, landscape, architecture and nature studies, but also experimented with new ways of using the medium. One of Callahan's favorite themes was the repeating pattern, whether in multiple reeds reflected on a lakes surface or the rows of windows on a buildings facade. While lesser known than some of his other work, Callahan's collages demonstrate an intense interest in and profound understanding of the process of photographic seeing. His collages are rigorous yet playful explorations of a visual world created in his studio. The subject is either faces cut from magazines or rectangles cut from black or white paper. Callahan then photographed the collages pinned to his studio wall on his 8x10-inch view camera, one leading to the next to create this never before published series.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3869301406/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(Callahan's French archive records a year of plenitude and...)
Callahan's French archive records a year of plenitude and serenity in Provence. In France, Callahan created a series of nature studies, urban views and portraits of Eleanor.
https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Callahan-Archives-Aix-en-Provence-1957-1958/dp/233006831X/?tag=2022091-20
Harry Callahan was born on the 22nd of October, 1912 in Detroit, Michigan, United States.
Callahan studied engineering briefly at Michigan State College.
In 1946 Harry Callahan was invited to teach photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago by László Moholy-Nagy. He moved to Rhode Island in 1961 to establish a photography program at the Rhode Island School of Design, teaching there until his retirement in 1977.
Harry Callahan left almost no written records - no diaries, letters, scrapbooks or teaching notes. His technical photographic method was to go out almost every morning, walk through the city he lived in and take numerous pictures. He then spent almost every afternoon making proof prints of that day's best negatives. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Harry Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year.
Callahan's work was a deeply personal response to his own life. He encouraged his students to turn their cameras on their own lives, leading by example. Harry Callahan photographed his wife over a period of fifteen years, as his prime subject. Eleanor was essential to his art from 1947 to 1960. He photographed her everywhere at home, in the city streets, in the landscape; alone, with their daughter, in black and white and in color, nude and clothed, distant and close. He tried several technical experiments - double and triple exposure, blurs, large and small format film.
In 1956, Harry Callahan received the Graham Foundation Award, which allowed him to spend a year in France with his family from 1957 to 1958. He settled in Aix-en-Provence, where he took many photographs.
Along with the painter Richard Diebenkorn, he represented the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1978. In 1994, Harry Callahan selected 130 original prints with the help of the gallery owner Peter MacGill, and brought them together under the name of French Archives, to offer them to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Some of these images were taken in Aix-en-Provence and in the South of France, and are the subject of a temporary exhibition at the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence in 2019.
Harry Callahan left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona maintains his photographic archives. In 2013, Vancouver Art Gallery received a gift of almost 600 Callahan photographs from the Larry and Cookie Rossy Family Foundation.
Harry Callahan died in Atlanta in 1999.
(Gathers nudes, portraits, abstracts, and collages that fe...)
1984(Collects photographs from a traveling exhibition of the s...)
1988(Harry Callahan was one of the most respected and influent...)
2012(Callahan's French archive records a year of plenitude and...)
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Harry Callahan was totally self-motivated, extremely curious about technique, and continually willing to try new approaches.
Harry Callahan was married to Eleanor Knapp. They had two children, Barbara and Mary.