Harry Callahan

flush-mounted to silver-paper-backed illustration board, signed by the photographer in ink and annotated 'TOP' and with numerical notations in unidentified hands in blue, red, and black pencil on the reverse, matted, circa 1944

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Private Collector, San Francisco, acquired from the above, 1993

Another print of this image:

Sarah Greenough, Harry Callahan (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1966, in conjunction with the exhibition), fig. 5

This impressive early print by Callahan is essentially in excellent condition. It is on photographic paper with a slightly glossy finish and, as is characteristic of Callahan's early prints, is mounted to stiff illustration board. When examined very closely in raking light, a faint network of tiny cracks can be seen along the edges of the print. There are several other stray areas of similar crackling within the image. This is a condition issue common to early mounted prints of Callahan's images – none of the cracks breaks the emulsion, and they are only visible upon close scrutiny. There is evidence of an old crease in the print and mount on the left side of the image, measuring about 4 inches, visible only under close examination. There is minor wear along the print's edges, with some occasional insignificant loss of emulsion. None of these condition issues is obtrusive, nor do they detract from the overwhelmingly fine appearance of this print. The reverse of the illustration board mount is backed with silver paper. There is a loss on this silver paper on the upper right side of the reverse – this does not affect the image, nor does it undermine the stability of the mount in that area.
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The photograph offered here is a rare large print made early in Callahan's career in his hometown of Detroit, where he supported himself and his wife with various jobs at the Chrysler Corporation.  Callahan had begun taking pictures in 1938; he joined the Chrysler Camera Club in that year and the Detroit Photo Guild in 1940.  While membership in these clubs put him in touch with other photographers and gave him access to technical information, their conservative outlook did little to inspire Callahan.  Exposure to work outside the limited confines of the camera clubs came in the person of Arthur Siegel, a fellow Detroiter who had studied photography under László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the late 1930s.  Returning to Detroit, Siegel set out to reform the stodginess of the local camera clubs, advocating technical and aesthetic experimentation and a rejection of the 'artistic' effects so frequently utilized by amateurs.  Siegel also promoted the use of glossy photographic paper over the more popular matte-surface, textured, and toned varieties. 

In 1941, Siegel arranged for Ansel Adams to conduct an intensive two-weekend workshop at the Detroit Miniature Camera Club.  Callahan participated, and the effect upon his work was immediate.  As John Pultz recounts in his essay 'Ansel Adams and Harry Callahan: A Case Study of Influence' (Ansel Adams: New Light: Essays on his Legacy and Legend, Friends of Photography, 1993), Callahan hounded Adams for information regarding his favored papers, lenses, and chemistry.  Seeing Adams's five-image Surf Sequence at the workshop was for Callahan a formative experience.  Callahan also caught Adams's keen appreciation for music.  The encounter with Adams broadened the young photographer's horizons regarding photographic technique and aesthetics, and introduced him to an artistic world beyond photography. 

The photograph offered here—a double exposure that marries two separate images of pedestrians and automobiles into a complex and cohesive whole—shows the extent to which experimentation and attention to craft had become the foundations of Callahan's work by the early 1940s.  Likely made with the photographer's 9-by-12cm.-format Linhof camera, the present photograph is a rare large print from this period and is from a series of multiple-exposure studies of the urban environment Callahan made between 1943 and 1945 (cf. Greenough, Harry Callahan, pp. 27-30).  Callahan began the series with the medium-format Linhof, which he removed from its customary tripod to give him greater mobility while photographing on the street.  He later switched to a smaller 35mm Contax camera.  As Pultz notes in another examination of the photographer's work in Detroit, 'Harry Callahan: Early Street Photography, 1943-1945' (The Archive 28, Center for Creative Photography, 1990), Callahan typically printed these images in small sizes—the Linhof images as contact prints, and the 35mm images in roughly the same size—initially mounting them to the silver board he favored at the time.  The photograph offered here, flush-mounted to silver board, may be unique in this large size.  As of this writing, only one other print of this image has been located: a smaller-format 1940s print in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.