Harry Callahan

2 photographs, each signed in pencil in the margin and on the reverse, framed, 1960s, printed ca. 1970 (2)

Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, 2000

Other images from this series:

Harry Callahan (Santa Barbara: El Mochuelo Gallery, 1964), pl. 28

Sherman Paul, Harry Callahan (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967), p. 30

Britt Salveson, Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work (Tucson: The Center for Creative Photography, 2006), fig. 17 a-d

These prints, on double-weight Agfa paper, are in overall excellent condition. The margin corners are very slightly bumped. There are clamp impressions from processing in the upper right margin corners of each print. One print has the following written in pencil on the reverse: 'SEIBU-45' and 'HC10682C' and the other 'SEIBU #47' and 'HC10689C.' There is faint, scattered soiling on the reverse of each print, as well as a few tiny fox marks. When examined under ultraviolet light, these photographs appear to fluoresce.
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These two studies of telephone wires are part of Callahan’s decades-long investigations of humble yet strikingly elegant subjects.   While living in Detroit in 1941, Callahan attended a photographic workshop given by Ansel Adams.  At the time, Callahan shared Adams’s obsession with sharpness and precision in printing.  Shortly after their fortuitous meeting, however, Callahan would move away from Adams’s total fixation on natural subjects, and instead train his camera on the man-made: building facades, telephone wires, chairs, and even wastebaskets. 

Callahan’s minimalist high-contrast studies from this period bear striking resemblance to ink line drawings.  As John Szarkowski notes in Harry Callahan: Nature, 'The first of the calligraphic nature details, the multiple exposures, the pedestrians, the wires against the sky, the flat wall details, were all made before Callahan went to Chicago.  It seems that he was from the beginning committed to the goal of discovering new formal potentials in the medium, of extending the known possibilities of the tradition, rather than redeploying an existing vocabulary to serve the needs of personal sensibility' (unpaginated).