Harry Callahan. - book reviews

The Harry Callahan show, which opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., offers a new interpretation of one of the most important formalist and experimentalist American photographers at work since 1940. The exhibition organizer, Sarah Greenough, approaches Callahan chronologically, which she says other exhibitions and catalogues have not. While her claim overlooks exhibitions and catalogues that have sequenced Callahan's photographs roughly in the order they were made, she is right that no one previously has done so to discern their stylistic development. Instead, earlier writers either discussed a single category of picture within Callahan's oeuvre (his wife, Eleanor, or the city, for example) or attempted to characterize Callahan overall, without making strong chronological distinctions.

Greenough's chronological structure accomplishes two things. First, she is able to construct a stylistic progression for the work. What she finds is that Callahan moved from experimentation, in work he did in Detroit between 1941 and 1946, to what he called "seeing photographically," in photographs he made from 1946 to 1961, years he taught at the Institute of Design, in Chicago (p. 44). The alternation of order and chaos in this work, Greenough says, then gave way to a "distinct edginess" that began when he returned to Chicago from a sabbatical in France in 1957-58 (p. 51). That edginess became even more marked when he moved to Providence in 1961 to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1977, when Callahan retired from academic life, his work, much of it in color, has become simpler. In a wall label in the final room of the exhibition, Greenough claims that these late works are "less about their nominal subjects . . . and more about the act of seeing itself - about observation and contemplation."

The stylistic changes that Greenough characterizes seem credible enough (although I would suggest that the "edginess" she identifies first appeared in France, in pictures of town centers made ominous by heavy shadows), but more important is her identification of Callahan's ongoing practice of reworking subjects he had photographed years earlier to see if he could show through photography his intervening "growth and development as a person" (p. 44). By identifying this process, Greenough posits a reciprocity between Callahan's life and his photography that has been absent from more formalist analyses of his work. It also leads her to give greater emphasis to the role of process in Callahan's work than have previous writers. She writes that as "an artist who is more interested in the process than the product, who works through the medium to discover and ultimately know and understand both himself and his world, Callahan does not think in terms of creating photographic masterpieces, singular and complete unto themselves" (p. 9).

Given this emphasis on the importance that process over product has for Callahan, it is disappointing that the curator has composed the exhibition almost exclusively from previously published photographs. For Callahan, finished prints are merely static artifacts, necessary products that meet the needs of curators and book designers. He has made many other photographs, both variants of well-known images and others from unpublished projects, from which an exhibition could be drawn.

The only exception is Greenough's welcome inclusion of a dozen or so unpublished early works, mostly produced before Callahan moved to Chicago in 1946. Perhaps because these pictures lack the squeaky-clean purism of his better-known later work, they have not been previously exhibited or published; now they extend our understanding of Callahan and his development. His Self-Portrait, New York (1942), made on a trip to meet Alfred Stieglitz, is well described by Greenough as being both tentative and an homage to Stieglitz's 1919 double-exposure portrait of Dorothy True. Similarly eye-opening is Callahan's New York (1945), a dark picture with bright clouds reflected in a building's windows. It is perhaps as close as Callahan ever came to abstraction in a conventional painterly way and it shows his stylistic distance from Aaron Siskind, whose photographs (to which Callahan's are frequently compared) remained stylistically close to abstract expressionist painting throughout his career.

The emphasis in the National Gallery of Art's exhibition on Callahan's early work showcases its acquisitions of these and other previously unpublished works from the 1940s. Yet one wishes that the institution had been as anxious to acquire and exhibit his later work; only 15 out of the 116 images in the exhibition are from the 1980s and 1990s (decades when Callahan was still photographing quite actively), and only one of those pictures is from the National Gallery of Art's own collection. The curator also appears to have played it safe: While Greenough added early works to Callahan's published oeuvre, one suspects that she presents so few photographs from the last two decades because the publications that seem to have guided her selection (with pictures chosen by Callahan, Sherman Paul, and John Szarkows-ki) do not cover these years.(1)

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.

This last thought leads to a further direction for inquiry. The question is, To what degree do Callahan's pictures represent not the external world but rather Callahan himself? More so than with other photographers, discussions of Callahan's work have recourse - as does Greenough's - to his biography. Thus, while critics see Frank's photographs as specific to the cultural history of the 1950s, Callahan's pictures from the same time are seen as timeless and a historical. What is it about his images that so strongly demands that we consider them exclusively in biographical terms, to the exclusion of broader historical issues? I would answer that the insistent flatness of the work reifies vision, so that what we observe is less the world than a vision of the world, and Callahan's vision at that. In 1967 Paul wrote that, like Thoreau, Callahan was compelled "to undertake a self-exploratory adventure on life," keeping a journalistic record of his "daily excursions in his immediate surroundings."(5) But is this entirely true? Could the identity between the work and the life instead be fictive? In many ways Callahan's life does not appear in his work. While we sense that the work is imbued with the quotidian (there are no great moments, no large epiphanies), we also don't see most everyday activities. His wife, Eleanor, appears only as a model, free of other responsibilities. And we also see Callahan free from daily tasks: never teaching, never with his students, but rather always in the contemplative act of looking and photographing. If these pictures are diaristic, they record a life lived perfectly, within the strictures of modernism, where clean lines and the lack of ornament have actually changed consciousness.

Perhaps Callahan's lasting and important contribution to postwar photography comes not from his prodigious experimentation but from his highly personal, even diaristic, almost confessional, voice. Without his lead it is hard to imagine even work as different from it as Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), a photographic scrapbook of her odyssey through a period of personal troubles. By making sensibility rather than objective reality his subject, Callahan opened several generations of photographers and teachers to the possibility of such diaristic work, giving permission for photography that claims, above all else, "This is what I saw." He did this in both his art and his teaching. In this way, we can see Callahan - more than Walker Evans or even Frank - as a precursor of photographers such as Friedlander and Winogrand, who use formal means to intercede between the world and the image, to remind us of the role they played in the construction of their pictures. But if we admit that the diaristic quality of Callahan's photography could be mythic, maybe even fictive, then we might acknowledge that it anticipates, even permits, the diaristic work of late- and postmodernists such as Goldin, Sally Mann, and Cindy Sherman.

The exhibition, installed at the National Gallery of Art in six rooms of the East Wing, also follows Greenough's chronological organization. The 116-work show is a good size for viewing Callahan's pictures; their subtle tonalities and small dimensions (only a few of the prints are as large as 11 x 16 inches, and many more are quite small, some measuring only 3 3/8 by 4 9/16 inches) require close and deliberate inspection. The catalogue, which reproduces every work in the show, is an excellent substitute for those who cannot see the exhibition. The tritone negatives by Robert Hennessy provide the most lavish reproduction of Callahan's black-and-white photographs to date. This book will be mostly a pleasant surprise for anyone used to looking at Photographs: Harry Callahan or Callahan. Yet at times its lush, creamy white tones seem to run counter to Callahan's anti-Romantic intentions, adding depth and a patina of time absent from the original prints, which are often cooler and more bluish. These plates, like the entire exhibition, remove Callahan's work from the present and place it in the past. Perhaps this is an inevitable development.

Notes

1. Those publications are, respectively, Photographs: Harry Callahan (Santa Barbara, Calif.: El Mochuelo Gallery, 1964); Sherman Paul, Harry Callahan (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967); and John Szarkowski, Callahan (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1976).

2. Edward Steichen, wall label, Photographs by Harry Callahan and Robert Frank, Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 29-April 1, 1962.

3. Paul, Harry Callahan, 6. Although published two years after the exhibition Photographs by Harry Callahan and Robert Frank, the book was intended by the MoMA to be the accompanying publication. Because Frank had published many of his photographs in The Americans (1958), the museum had reasoned that he needed no further publication.

4. Szarkowski, Callahan, 10.

5. Paul, Harry Callahan, 6.

JOHN PULTZ, curator of photography and assistant professor of art history at the University of Kansas, wrote The Body and the Lens (Abrams, 1995) and is writing a monograph on Callahan.

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