Harry Callahan

PaceWildensteinMacGill, New York

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Acquired from the above in 1999 by the present owner

Douglas Fogle and Hannah Skerath, eds., Making Strange: The Chara Schreyer Collection (New York, 2021), pp. 319 and 413

Harry Callahan’s prodigious body of work can be distilled into three primary categories: cityscapes, the natural world, and portraits of his wife Eleanor. Callahan met Eleanor Knapp on a blind date in 1933, and in 1936, they married in Detroit. He began photographing Eleanor in 1947 and over the next decade, Callahan created an immense, defining body of work dedicated to his muse, posed alone or with their daughter Barbara. 

In his essay “Sublime Tenderness: The Portraits of Eleanor Callahan," photographer Emmet Gowin grapples with the notion of invisibility and affection: “The photographic portraits Harry Callahan made of his wife, Eleanor, inspire and open us to what is both visible and invisible, and it is of this sublime tenderness that I wish to speak here. Of course there is a watchfulness, almost or nearly a worshipful awe of her as a woman, as the center of the mystery of life; there is also a constancy of real and enduring beauty” (p. 12).

Early prints of this image are rare.