Harry Callahan

mounted to Crescent illustration board, signed in pencil on the mount, 1950s (An Eclectic Focus, p. 110)

Acquired from Pace/MacGill, New York, 1987

This photograph is on double-weight paper with a semi-glossy finish. It is in excellent condition. The print is mounted off-center onto Crescent illustration board with a light grey front. The mount may have been trimmed by Callahan to 8 by 10 inches – a not-uncommon practice for Callahan who frequently trimmed his mounts to fit into 8-by-10-inch photographic paper boxes for storage and transport. When examined under ultraviolet light, this print appears to fluoresce very slightly, as can be the case with photographic paper manufactured in the 1950s.
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This delicate multiple-exposure is not reproduced in the Callahan literature.  It demonstrates two of Callahan's enduring preoccupations: his focus on natural subject matter, and his drive to push photography past accepted conventions.  The image, with its overlapping layers of branches set against a white sky, comprises an abstract lattice of various translucencies.  As critic Janet Malcolm noted in her review of a 1978 exhibition of Callahan's work at New York's Light Gallery,

'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).    

Another print of this image is in The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  It is reproduced, in a different orientation from the print offered here, in An Eclectic Focus: Photographs from the Vernon Collection, p. 110.