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Harry Morey Callahan (October 22, 1912 - March 15, 1999) was an American photographer who is considered one of the great innovators of modern American photography. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and started photographing in 1938 as an autodidact. By 1946, he was appointed by László Moholy-Nagy to teach photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Callahan retired in 1977, at which time he was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. Callahan left almost no written records--no diaries, letters, scrapbooks or teaching notes. His technical photographic method was to go out almost every morning, walk the city he lived in and take numerous pictures. He then spent almost every afternoon making proof prints of that day's best negatives. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year. He photographed his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Barbara, and the streets, scenes and buildings of cities where he lived, showing a strong sense of line and form, and light and darkness. He also worked with multiple exposures. Callahan's work was a deeply personal response to his own life. He was well known to encourage his students to turn their cameras on their lives, and he led by example. Even as he did this he was not sentimental, romantic or emotional. Callahan illustrated the centrality of Eleanor in his life by his continual return to her over 15 years as his prime subject -- she was subject more than model -- but the images are not about who she was, what she did, what she thought as an individual. Callahan's art was a long meditation on the possibilities of photography as it might be used playfully, but not naively. Eleanor was essential to his art from 1947 to 1960. He photographed her everywhere--at home, in the city streets, in the landscape; alone, with their daughter, in black and white and in color, nude and clothed, distant and close. He tried every technical experiment--double and triple exposure, blurs, large camera and small. The attitude of respect and warmth permeates the endeavor. In 1950, his daughter, Barbara, was born, and even prior to her birth she showed up in pregnancy photographs. From 1948 to 1953, Eleanor, and sometimes Barbara, were shown out in the landscape as a tiny counterpoint to large expanses of park, skyline or water. No matter how small a part of the scene they are, they still dominate the viewer's perception. Callahan's work is personally oriented; many of his pictures artistically interpret his family relationships. His early work experimented with representational abstraction; his later work in color included additional subject matter, both city and landscapes as well as multiple exposures. Callahan left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which actively collects, preserves, interprets and makes available materials that are essential to understanding photography and its history and which holds more archives and individual works by 20th-century North American photographers than any other museum in the world, maintains the photographic archives of Harry Callahan. Callahan died in Atlanta in 1999. His estate is represented in New York by the Pace/MacGill Gallery.
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