Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work - Hardcover

Salvesen, Britt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300113323 ISBN 13: 9780300113327

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2005

Synopsis

A revelatory new study of the twentieth-century master Harry Callahan, offering insights into his often experimental process and his contribution to the history of photography

Harry Callahan (1912–1999) was one of the most influential photographic artists of the twentieth century. A master of modernist experimentation, Callahan explored a range of subjects—from landscapes to city streets to portraits of his wife—and techniques throughout his career.

Beautifully designed and produced, this book focuses on understanding how Callahan worked—both his day-to-day photographic explorations and his resulting fifty-year career in photography. Exploring the rich contents of the Harry Callahan Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, the authors look at how Callahan’s choice of subjects and visual ideas emerged from deliberate and improvisational processes, and how such processes might be revealed with archival materials such as negatives, transparencies, proof prints, sequential ordering, and variant printings. This close investigation of Callahan’s individual and experimental approach to materials in turn leads to a larger consideration of his relationship to seemingly contradictory strains in American visual culture of the twentieth century.

Reproducing a host of previously unpublished images and documents, this volume juxtaposes select artifacts—such as contact sheets and variants—with final images to explicate Callahan’s life in and influence upon photography. Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work will offer a rare glimpse into the creative process of an important and fascinating artist.

About this title

About the Author:

BrittSalvesen is curator at the Center for Creative Photography. John Szarkowski is director emeritus of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has written over twenty-five books on photography, including a 1976 publication on Callahan.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bringing together images from a career spanning 60 years, this catalogue commemorates Harry Callahan's singular photographic achievement. Among the volume's 120 plates are photographs of weeds and grasses arranged against the sky, women captured anonymously on street corners, intimate portraits of the photographer's wife, seemingly unremarkable streetscapes and snapshot-like outdoor portraits of Callahan's wife and daughter. Rarely iconic but always unexpectedly eloquent, Callahan's compositions reveal the idiosyncratic approach he developed after emerging from the influence of modernist giants Stieglitz and Adams, and retain a lively, searching quality befitting the work of a man who once said, "I think that when you get a style, you're sort of dead." Essays by John Szarkowski, former director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art; and Salvesen, curator at the Center for Creative Photography, make clear that the serendipitous, almost offhand elegance of Callahan's oeuvre came as the result of a lifelong commitment to the daily practice of photography, and contact sheets, slides, proof prints and negatives from the Callahan archives attest to his rigorous work ethic. With enough archival material and previously unpublished work to distinguish it from existing books on the artist, this work serves as both an introduction to the photographer and an essential volume for Callahan devotees.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0300113323
• ISBN 13: 9780300113327
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192