An Interview With My Favorite Photographer

{Atlanta, 1997 ...}

Even on a gloomy afternoon, light pours through the picture windows in Harry Callahan's condominium. It floods the living room where the celebrated photographer sits, several floors up in a Colony Square high- rise, gracing a splendid view of a stately oak tree in adjacent Ansley Park, and beyond it, of cars and people moving along Peachtree Street.

Most of us, blessed with such a perspective, would venture a glance and say, yeah: a tree. Trunk, limbs, branches, leaves. Great tree. Atlanta's got a lot of 'em. Harry Callahan would no doubt agree, but he would see so much more. He would see a universe of possibilities. He would take a camera, and he would begin to explore all the different ways that a tree could be looked at.


He might photograph it using such extreme contrast that the tree no longer resembled a tree at all, bleaching the image into pure abstract form; he might shoot multiple exposures of the tree, so that it blurred vertiginously against a blank sky; he might aim his lens directly up from the base of the tree, so that its limbs and branches and leaves came to resemble an aerial photograph of some anonymous marsh; he might conjure mystery in the shadow of the tree; or he might impose upon the tre e the image of his patient and gracious wife, Eleanor, her face, perhaps, or her classically nude torso.

Harry Callahan might snip off twigs from the tree and make something of that. You get the picture. It's just a tree, but there are so many ways to see it. This is what Callahan, who is 84, has done for most of his adult life. Look at trees, and city streets, at brick walls and natural expanses, at Eleanor and their daughter Barbara, at scraps of paper and complete, unknowing strangers, at light and at dark, in color and in black and white. Look, and reveal what others missed.


"The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image," Callahan has said, "is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively ---intuitively ---the camera can write poetry."


There's a lifetime of that in "Harry Callahan," a career-spanning exhibit of 116 photographs opening Tuesday at the High Museum of Art. The show, curated by Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art, reflects every aspect of Callahan's work, which has been marked by its rich, inquiring variety. There is not one style that belongs to Callahan ---who came to photography as an amateur enthusiast, embraced it as a fervent faith and would become one of its most influential teachers ---but rather several.


"If the show does nothing else, it absolutely cements his reputation as one of the greats of 20th century photography," says Ellen Fleurov, the High's curator of photography. "He's been a restless experimenter all through his career."

But Callahan, who continued to steadily produce new work until impaired by a 1995 stroke, makes no grand claims for himself. He is, and has always been, a solid, workaday Midwesterner wholly invested in the process of his art, which, alongside Eleanor, his wife of 60 years, has been a singular and consuming passion.


"I've always been nuts about photography," he says, enunciating each syllable with effort and care as he sits beneath a wall covered with framed images ---an abstraction of dense foliage; a Chicago street scene alive with striking angles ---which make his home a kind of one-man museum. "That's the only thing I could do. And when I ran out of gas with something, I tried something and later came back again. I think I photographed almost everything in the first two years. But I went away an d came back, and it had changed. My treatment, that's really what it is. The person changes."

Yet Callahan, who moved to Atlanta 13 years ago to be near his daughter and her family, has been remarkably consistent throughout his career. "His work is absolutely about the potential of the medium," says Keith Davis, fine art programs director for Hallmark Cards, whose extensive collections include some 300 Callahan photographs. "It's about how a visual genius sees the world. They're about the process, about the world, about living."


Despite the work's historical significance, it hasn't made Callahan a household name. "His work is not `controversial,' it's not `provocative,' " Davis says. "It's simply great."


That work began in earnest after a life-changing encounter with Ansel Adams in 1941, when the epic landscape photographer gave a workshop at the Detroit Photo Guild.

"Ansel came and all the lights lit up, " recalls Callahan, who had been struggling to find a direction for his photography while employed as a clerk for Chrysler. It wasn't Adams' "spectacular stuff" that grabbed his attention, but rather close-ups of seemingly more prosaic gravel pits, of grasses and ferns. "I was living in Michigan and there were no big mountains," Callahan says, laughing. "I was anxious to go West before, but I didn't like what I got. I like what I got in Michigan."


Tellingly, a 1942 trip to Colorado yielded one print: a snapshot-like portrait of the Callahans posed face to face in the foreground with the grandiose sweep of the Rockies as backdrop. Even here, the photographer sought a sense of intimacy. Back home, he began an intensive phase of exploration, applying what he learned from Adams. The master photographer stressed not only the necessity of tactile clarity in an image, but the inherent spiritual nature of photography itself. These lessons hav e stayed with Callahan, who was satisfied photographing immediate, everyday scenery that most urban dwellers took for granted or ignored: ripples on Lake Michigan, a weathered concrete wall in Chicago, a utility pole, studded with hundreds of staples, on Peachtree Street. "I like the walls," he says simply. "I like signs. I like surfaces."


Adams was not his only inspiration. He was greatly influenced by Alfred Stieglitz, whom he met on a 1942 pilgrimage to New York. And a pivotal 1946 appointment to the Institute of Design in Chicago ---where he taught until 1961, when he left to develop the new photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design ---brought Callahan into a heady new orbit. He absorbed lessons from the school's founder, Bauhaus artist Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, the architect Mies van der Rohe and a host of others associated with the modernist hothouse.


Importantly, he began a second career in teaching, one that would support his photography until retirement in 1977. "I don't think I am very bright," Callahan says, a disarming statement from someone whose work fused the key qualities of both European and American modernist styles, whose technical savvy is matched by an enthusiasm that makes his late work feel as fresh and engaged as his earliest exposures. But this is modesty of the self-made, all-American kind. "I had a good IQ, but I didn't ever go to college." Instead, he learned on the job. "This is how I got an education ---teaching. I liked it because I could say what I believed. Many times I thought I would quit, but when I saw the students' work at the end of the semester I was happy again." ("Harry Callahan and His Students: New Acquisitions," a parallel exhibit at the High, will showcase works by Callahan and some of his more notable students, who include a diverse group of photographers such as Emmet Gowin, Linda Connor, Bil l Burke, Ray Metzger and Atlanta residents John McWilliams and


Constant through all of Callahan's endeavors, however, has been Eleanor. Now a youthful 80, she represents an essential core of her husband's work, appearing in classic nude abstractions and posing in the couple's Chicago ballroom studio of the 1950s, standing on street corners and up to her neck in Lake Michigan.


"This was just an everyday occurrence," Eleanor Callahan says. "Whatever was on his mind at the time was what we shot. . . . It's his life, and he does it every day. He's never let up a minute, even now, after the stroke. He's loved every minute of it."


Except for images of Eleanor, and Barbara as a child, Callahan shuns traditional portraiture. He preferred, after Walker Evans, to catch subjects "when their guard is down," and so stealthily snapped close-ups of Chicago pedestrians edged in urban anxiety. Yet he could focus prolifically on his wife, whom he met on a blind date and who would become a kind of all-purpose muse, distinguished by a profound calm and unwavering dignity.


"Yes," Callahan explains, "because I know her. She was wonderful. She did it. She was agreeable to everything I asked her. I think I have always been moved by what I thought was beautiful. She was beautiful . . . not Hollywood's type."


The photographer, whose lively spirit persists despite age and health ailments, who, in fact, is still taking pictures, turns a lens on himself for a moment. "I think I have always been affected by looks, " he says, and laughs again. "I thought grass was beautiful. I thought trees were beautiful."