Harry Callahan

mounted, signed in pencil on the mount, annotated '20 MOMA' on the reverse, matted, a Dan Berley collection label on the reverse, framed, 1958, probably printed in the 1960s

Collection of Dan Berley, New York

Howard Greenberg Gallery, 2005

Harry Callahan (The Museum of Modern Art, 1967), p. 20

Peter C. Bunnell, Harry Callahan, 38^th Venice Biennial 1978 (New York: International Exhibitions Committee of the American Federation of Arts, 1978), pl. 16

Sarah Greenough, Harry Callahan (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1996), p. 114

John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now (The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 271

Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History, 1945 to the Present (New York, 1984), p. 67

This print, on single-weight paper with a glossy surface and mounted on white board, is in generally excellent condition.
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Harry Callahan’s work is informed by two seemingly opposed photographic doctrines: the rigorous emphasis on craft espoused by Ansel Adams, whom Callahan first met in 1941; and the highly experimental approach of László Moholy-Nagy that Callahan encountered through his colleague and friend Arthur Siegel. Siegel had studied under Moholy in the 1930s at Chicago’s New Bauhaus and was hired by him to formulate the school’s photography curriculum when it became the Institute of Design.  Siegel, in turn, hired Callahan, who served as head of the ID’s photography program from 1949 to 1961. 

In Callahan’s work one sees both a consummate understanding of the technicalities of photography, and the will to bend the medium to creative use.  His many explorations led him to experiment, always productively, with photomontage, abstraction, color, and, as seen here, multiple exposure.  While austere in his vision, Callahan did not hesitate to include the personal in his work.  His studies of his wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara are among the most intimate documents produced by a photographer in the last century.  The double exposure offered here, in which Eleanor’s torso is superimposed over a flowering meadow, shows both Callahan’s technical mastery as well as his adventurously experimental approach, and is imbued with a personal sensibility.