Harry Callahan 1912-1999

mounted to illustration board, signed, titled, and dated by the photographer in ink and with the El Mochuelo Gallery label, with typed credit, title, date, and 'No. 101' on the reverse, 1950, printed no later than 1964

The photographer to El Mochuelo Gallery, Santa Barbara 

Light Gallery, New York

Private Collection

Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Acquired by the present collection from the above, 2000 

Santa Barbara, El Mochuelo Gallery, 1964

Photographs: Harry Callahan (Santa Barbara: El Mochuelo Gallery, 1964),  pl. 84 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

Harry Callahan (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967), p. 65 and rear cover

Sarah Greenough, Harry Callahan (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1996), p. 73

Katherine Ware, Elemental Landscapes: Photographs by Harry Callahan (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), pl. 4

Peter Galassi, American Photography 1890-1965 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), p. 193

The four Harry Callahan photographs offered in these pages were all shown in the solo exhibition of Callahan’s work at El Mochuelo Gallery, Santa Barbara, California in 1964. Not only were these prints part of the exhibition, but they were the very images used for reproduction in the book that accompanied the exhibition, Photographs: Harry Callahan (Santa Barbara: El Mochuelo Gallery, 1964), the first monograph published on Callahan’s work.  The mount of each of these photographs has the El Mochuelo Gallery letterpress label, with the typewritten plate number from the book, on the reverse. 

By the early 1960s, Callahan was well into his photographic and teaching career and his work had been the subject of a number of  solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (1951), Black Mountain College (1951), Kansas City Art Institute (1956), George Eastman House (1958), the Hallmark Gallery (1964), as well as numerous group exhibitions, including many at The Museum of Modern Art (1948, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1955, 1960, 1962, 1963, and 1964).  The major themes of his work were well underway at this point: studies of his wife and daughter Eleanor and Barbara, landscapes, and city work.  It is surprising, given the maturity of his work and his exposure in a wide range of exhibitions, that his work had not yet been published in a dedicated book until the El Mochuelo volume.

The short-lived El Mochuelo Gallery was founded by Wayne Thompson and David Van Riper.  Thompson and Van Riper had intended Photographs: Harry Callahan to be the first in a series of photographic monographs.  While the series never materialized, the Callahan book Van Riper and Thompson produced is impressive, even by today’s standards, for the high quality of its reproductions and the sophistication of its layout.  Callahan himself was responsible for sequencing the 126 reproductions into the book’s five sections.  Photographs: Harry Callahan still stands today as the most complete collection of the photographer’s work in book form, and is one of the most sought-after of modern photography books (cf. Andrew Roth, et al, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, pp. 168-69). 

In the book’s artist statement, Callahan wrote, ‘I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.’