Harry Callahan

A first edition, signed copy of Harry Callahan's Water's Edge.

• Harry Callahan (American).
• With an introductory poem by A.R. Ammons.
• Connecticut: Callaway Editions distributed by the Viking Press, 1980.
• 76 pages.
• Folio.
• With black-and-white photographs printed in duotone offset.
• Includes original gelatin silver photograph (5 x 5 inches) mounted on rag paper, signed and numbered in pencil.
• Number 30 of 50 signed copies in set II (of IV), each with a different gelatin silver photograph in an edition of 50 (200 copies in total with an additional 16 hors commerce).
• With an afterword by Harry Callahan.
• Bound in natural linen-covered boards, with cream endpapers, print laid in to the publisher's grey paper portfolio with title to front in blind, housed together in the publisher's quarter vellum over linen drop spine box with titles stamped in blind on spine.

Callahan informally began his series of beach photographs in 1938 at Lake Hutton, where his wife's family had a cottage. But it wasn't until 1946, when he started teaching at the Chicago Institute of Design (The New Bauhaus), that he felt he had taken his first good pictures of the subject, taking photographs on the shore of Lake Michigan, just three blocks from his house. The series took shape when Callahan moved to New England to teach at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1961. In his afterword, he writes: "I think that nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness—the point where you can't go any farther. I feel I have come close to that at various times with the Beach Series photographs. A determined single-mindedness and an insistent inner need has led me to that point. That is why I have always kept going back, and that is what still keeps me going today—keeps me alive?"