Harry Callahan. - book reviews

In her invocation of chronology and her choice of early work Greenough makes Callahan more a historical figure than a contemporary one - a status further suggested by the fact that in this exhibition most prints come not from the photographer, as they had for his earlier shows, but from private collections, museums, and galleries. This is in sharp contrast with exhibitions that presented Callahan in light of them contemporary art and criticism. When Edward Steichen exhibited Callahan (with Robert Frank) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1962, he presented both men's work within the context of cold-war humanism, writing that they "probed and explored the medium, in relation to themselves, to the world and to the times in which we live."(2) This same cold-war humanistic exhortation to individualism prevailed in 1967 in the introduction to a MoMA book of Callahan's photographs, in which literary scholar Sherman Paul called Callahan's otherwise impenetrable photographs his "means of awareness, of contact with his environment."(3)

A decade later Callahan was presented as a formalist, not a humanist. Szarkowski emphasized the formal qualities of Callahan's work in his essay for the Callahan exhibition that opened in 1976 at the MoMA. Tacitly applying Greenbergian modernism to photography, Szarkowski considered Callahan's pictures to be intrinsically photographic (as he did the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and the other younger photographers he championed). Writing of Callahan's photograph of Chicago row-house facades, from around 1950, Szarkowski judged the photographer's interest in them as "vernacular architecture, as dwellings, as anthropological artifacts... photographically relevant only to the degree that they found expression in photographic terms." Otherwise, he continued, such interests were "extrapictorial" and "relevant only when they, along with the formal elements of the picture, were dissolved in one homogeneous solution, in which no part could be said to have a life of its own."(4)

That Callahan is now presented at the National Gallery of Art as a historical figure shows how much photography has changed in the last two decades. In the 1960s Steichen and Paul and in the 1970s Szarkowski could embed Callahan's work within contemporary practice. In the 1990s, the mainstream of photographic practice has changed radically, rejecting the purist/formalist tradition that Callahan had epitomized for earlier critics. The modernist emphasis on the purity of artistic means Szarkowski had applied in his analysis of Callahan's facade picture has given way to the postmodernist embrace of a multiplicity of means and meanings in works of art that emphasize precisely what Szarkowski dismissed as "extrapictorial."

Callahan's seeming distance from current art and criticism could have given Greenough sufficient perspective to begin a historical re-evaluation of the photographer's place in history. Despite the trappings of history for the exhibition, she fails to place historically and to contextualize culturally the meaning of Callahan's attention to seeing. Given that Callahan's concern with "seeing photographically" began in the 1950s, one is tempted to seek a connection between it and the role visibility (or the lack of it) played in cold-war politics and culture. The main threats to bourgeois stability, namely Communism and homosexuality, were thought to be especially insidious precisely because they were presumed by the establishment to be imperceptible. And the responses to these threats - psychic retreat from the public realm to an interior state, and a flight from diversity to conformity - in their very shift into invisibility, were played out within the visual field. The role that vision and visibility played in cold-war culture offers the possibility of interpreting Callahan's pictures as means to construct and define his individuality (a key to 1950s culture) within a realm that was visual. Because his photographs are so understated - distant and emotionally cool - viewers are forced to ponder why they were made. Instead of the emotions and sentiments we expect to find in them, we encounter (or so we are made to feel) pure acts of looking.