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Artist or Maker: HARRY CALLAHAN 1912-1999
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Dimensions: 8 1/4 by 6 1/2 in. (20.8 by 16.6 cm.)
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Provenance: Acquired from Pace/MacGill, New York, 1987
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Literature: Another print of this image:
Julian Cox, Harry Callahan: Eleanor (High Museum of Art, 2007), cover and pl. 9
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Notes:
This photograph of Callahan's wife and muse, Eleanor, was made relatively early in the photographer's tenure as photography teacher at Chicago's Institute of Design. He had been hired in 1946 by fellow Detroiter Arthur Siegel, who had himself been hired to teach photography at the school by László Moholy-Nagy (see Lot 139) in its first incarnation as the New Bauhaus. Moholy-Nagy's inventive curriculum for photography, which continued after his death in 1946, promoted experimentation with light (as photography's fundamental element) and exploration of the medium's flexible nature. None of this was new to Callahan in 1946, who had been conducting his own quiet but extensive inquires into photography's possibilities since the early years of the decade.
The double-exposure offered here may be the only early print of the image extant. Early prints of any of Callahan's images from the 1940s are scarce. As is typical of the 1940s prints, the photograph offered here is mounted onto sturdy Brudno illustration board, which was manufactured by the Brudno Art Supply Company in Chicago. A later, unsigned print of this image was reproduced on the cover of the High Museum of Art's catalogue for its 2007 Harry Callahan: Eleanor exhibition. The illustrated print, from the Nicholas Pritzker Collection, is unsigned and believed to have been made in the 1970s or 1980s.
As in so much of Callahan's work, this photograph crosses several boundaries. It functions as a portrait, although its abstract elements are at odds with photographic portraiture's purpose. And the literal and direct presentation of Eleanor would seem to undermine the classification of the image as an abstraction. By 1948, the year in which this image was made, Callahan had worked extensively with multiple exposures and numerous other experimental techniques. Here the technique is relatively straightforward: two images are merged together, either as an in-camera double exposure, or through the pairing of two separate negatives in the darkroom. The result is a multi-layered image, evocative and enigmatic, that is beyond category.
Avid and inspired experimentation was a hallmark of Callahan's work throughout his career, as was his rigorous devotion to the craft of photography. In a 1977 interview, Callahan said of experimentation, 'I always wanted to try a lot of different things. For example, multiple exposures were something I really liked. I made them early on and continued, but only at certain times were they successful. Everything just builds on everything else' (Salvesen, Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work, p. 182).
