Harry Callahan

flush-mounted to another Harry Callahan photograph of Newspapers, signed by the photographer in ink and numbered '315.39' by him in pencil on the reverse, matted, circa 1949

The photographer to Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Acquired by the Quillan Company from the above, 1989

Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991), pl. 50 (this print)

Another print of this image:

Beyond Time: Photographs from the Gary B. Sokol Collection (The Israel Museum, 2006, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 165

This print is on double-weight paper with a semi-glossy surface, and sets forth a huge amount of detail. When examined closely, it can be seen that there is very minor wear on the print's edges, as well as some loss of emulsion on the print's upper right corner. When the print is examined closely in raking light, a very faint soft 2-inch crease is visible in the upper right corner. Also visible only in raking light is a small area in the brickwork, to the left of the image's center, that is glossier than the surrounding area. Somewhat atypically, this photograph was mounted by Callahan back-to- back with another of his photographs. This second photograph, a study of the Sunday, 13 November 1949, edition of the Chicago Tribune, appears to be overexposed and is likely a rejected print that was repurposed as a mount. The practice of mounting a print back-to-back with another, which is an effective way of both stiffening the photograph and rendering it completely flat, was relatively common among photographers, most notably Paul Strand.
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This meticulously composed architectural study dates from Harry Callahan's first years in Chicago, where he taught photography at the Institute of Design.  The photographer's meditative, detailed rendering of the urban environment represents a further step in the photographer's refinement of the medium, begun earlier in the decade, as a tool for personal expression.  Early prints of Callahan's photographs from the 1940s are scarce, and as of this writing, only one other early print of this image has been located: in the collection of Gary B. Sokol, San Francisco.

Callahan was hired to teach photography at the Institute of Design in 1946 by his friend and fellow Detroiter, Arthur Siegel.  He became head of the Photography Department in 1949, and held the post until 1961.  During his tenure, Callahan was responsible for hiring, among others, Aaron Siskind (Lot 2), who came aboard in 1951.  Like his colleague Siskind and the Institute's founder and guiding light, László Moholy-Nagy (Lot 39), Callahan's approach to photography was characterized by tireless experimentation.  

The photograph offered here is part of a body of work begun in Chicago of building façades.  The image's precise composition exemplifies the deliberation with which Callahan approached photography.  Its rendering of the roughly-bricked façade, in which each individual brick is clearly visible, demonstrates Callahan's thorough mastery of the technical aspects of the medium.    

In critic Janet Malcolm's perceptive review of a 1978 exhibition of Callahan's work at Light Gallery she writes: 

'Harry Callahan has produced some of the purest and most austere abstract photography of our time.  His career is one of those monuments to dedication and work and care and belief in self that command respect even where they do not induce love.  His spare abstractions of marsh grasses, telephone wires, and weeds in snow which look like nervous-lined modern drawings; his photographs of architectural facades which look like Mondrians; his surrealistic superimposition of his wife's torso on grassy fields; his abstract closeups of the anxious faces of people on the streets of Chicago--all have established his reputation in modern-art circles and reflect his connection with the painterly tradition of photography' ('Photography,' The New Yorker, December 4, 1978, pp. 225-234).