Harry Callahan

ABOUT   IMAGES

Harry Callahan: From A Recently Acquired collection
September 12 - October 19, 2019

Food For Thought
March 31 – May 14, 2011

At The Water's Edge
July 7 – August 26, 2011

Back at the Water's Edge
July 7 - August 19, 2016

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) was born in Detroit, Michigan. Callahan's work was intensely personal; he photographed his family extensively and was constantly innovating and refining his technique. He began photographing in 1938 and was entirely self-taught. In 1946, he was hired by László Moholy-Nagy to teach photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. From the late 1940s to early 1960s, his central model and muse was his wife Eleanor Callahan, whose image he returned to again and again. Although he photographed extensively, he only produced approximately one dozen final images each year. From 1961 to 1977, Callahan taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, encouraging his students to examine their own lives through photography as he did. Much of his work approaches abstraction, as Callahan experimented with line and form, light and dark. Although he is best known for his black-and-white photographs, Callahan was a pioneering innovator of color photography later in his life. Callahan died in Atlanta, Georgia in 1999.