The Technical Process and Artistic Vision of Harry Callahan

The technical process was so weird early on, sometimes trying to reproduce color accurately was just so strange to the eye. One thing he found that he enjoyed a lot was making abstraction from neon lights not shown at night. You see it clearly in this image, where you have "dancing nights" or something like that, with abstracted shapes around it. If it didn't have that, that's what would be grounding to what's real, and the rest of it is simply a beautiful abstract piece. This style is almost more egg-like, telling me if I can make a word out of that which is...the back of a woman walking down the street.

I love this picture mainly because it's such a wonderful kind of study in shape, almost with the woman's dress, but also because it's a real cinema graphic or cinematography. It's almost more like something you'd see in a movie theater, where you expect to be walking with this woman and wondering where we're going. I think this picture tells quite a story even though it's fairly early color image.

Harry Callahan was extremely prolific photographer, and at the time of his death in 1999, he had around 100,000 images donated to the Center for Creative Photography out in Arizona. The center is kind of the caretaker and steward of his work, showcasing his legacy. He worked in four distinct different styles, and despite his lack of commercial success, he was just a great photographer who didn't do it for fame or fortune.

Callahan's career was mainly after teaching at two different schools, including Chrysler, but he left to pursue his passion for photography. His focus was on creating life in pictures, which required change at different points. This approach reflected his interest and love for life itself. He believed that art should be a reflection of the world around us, and through his work, we can gain insight into human nature.

Despite being known as "the father of color photography," Callahan didn't become famous until later in his career. However, this made him more real and relatable to audiences. His work shows that with dedication and perseverance, anyone can achieve success. He was influenced by jazz music, particularly West Montgomery, a musician who is also not well-known but is brilliant.

The Comparison of Callahan to Jazz Music

Callahan's style and approach to photography are similar to jazz music in many ways. Just as jazz musicians push boundaries and experiment with new sounds, Callahan pushed the limits of color photography. He wasn't afraid to try new things and adapt his style over time, which is evident in his work.

One thing that sets Callahan apart from other famous photographers is his approachability. Unlike Ansel Adams or Edward Steichen, who were both influential figures in photography, Callahan's story is more relatable and down-to-earth. He wasn't a rockstar or a celebrity photographer; he was just a person who loved making pictures.

Callahan's work also reflects his introspective nature. He didn't shy away from exploring complex emotions and themes through his photography. His images are not only visually stunning but also tell stories that resonate with viewers on a deeper level.

A Legacy of Love and Passion

The most striking thing about Callahan's legacy is the sheer amount of work he produced over his lifetime. It's estimated that he took around 100,000 images, which is an incredible number considering the technology available at the time. This body of work showcases his dedication to photography and his passion for capturing life in all its forms.

Callahan's approach to photography was not just about technical skill but also about conveying emotions and ideas through his images. His love for life and his ability to capture moments in time are what make his work so remarkable. By studying Callahan's photography, we can gain a deeper understanding of the world around us and the importance of capturing life's beauty.

Callahan's Story: A Journey of Creativity and Passion

Harry Callahan's story is one of creativity, passion, and perseverance. Despite facing challenges and criticism early on in his career, he remained committed to his craft and continued to push boundaries with his photography. His love for life and his ability to capture its beauty through his images have left behind a lasting legacy that continues to inspire artists and photographers today.

Callahan's work is not just about technical skill but also about conveying emotions and ideas through his images. By studying his photography, we can gain a deeper understanding of the world around us and the importance of capturing life's beauty. His approach to photography reflects his introspective nature, and his love for life and his ability to capture moments in time are what make his work so remarkable.

Conclusion

Harry Callahan was a photographer who never lost sight of his passion for making pictures. Despite facing challenges and criticism early on in his career, he remained committed to his craft and continued to push boundaries with his photography. His legacy is a testament to the power of creativity and perseverance, and his work continues to inspire artists and photographers today.

Callahan's story serves as a reminder that art should be a reflection of the world around us. Through his photography, we can gain insight into human nature and the importance of capturing life's beauty. By studying Callahan's work, we can learn about the power of creativity and passion and how they can bring people together.

Callahan's legacy is one of love and passion for photography. His dedication to his craft and his ability to capture moments in time have left behind a lasting impact on the world of art. As we look at his images today, we are reminded of the importance of living life to the fullest and capturing its beauty through our own creative pursuits.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody welcome back to another episode of the art of photography my name is Ted Forbes and today we are going to talk about Harry Callahan and now I'm not talking about Dury Harry Callahan the Clint Eastwood character I'm talking about the American photographer Harry Callahan Kelley has a very interesting photographer to me he's one of my favorites and this is one this episode's when I'm researching and doing it I mean you know you dig into a photographer's images and some of these people you know you're familiar with a lot of their work but you go in and there's such a breadth and refreshing revisit to a lot of these from me at least and I just think the world of Callahan and I think he's very influential in me in a number of ways I there's a lot of very likeable things about him he was a guy who started later in life as a photographer he was well into his 30s before he really got serious about it and I think that you know he just you have somebody who just had this complete passion for creating images and the methods that he went to do those the way he changed his style up several times and the fact that he never was in this for commercial gain or fame or fortune or anything like that you have a guy who just shot a lot of amazing work knew some amazing people and eventually ended up taking two different teaching positions but basically he was born in 1912 in Detroit Michigan and one of his first jobs he worked as a clerk for Chrysler Motor Corporation I believe and was there that he met his future wife Eleanor and when they were married she later became one of his most famous subjects he did an enormous amount of pictures with her and then later his daughter Barbara and a lot of his daily regimen when he lived in Chicago was to get up in the morning and he would go for walks with them and shoot portraits and these kind of snapshot looks and we'll see a few of those today and they're amazing but you have somebody that was just I think brilliant in a lot of ways there is a video that was shot probably in the 80s it's an interview from visions and images I believe was the name of the show and it's very dated but it's a very interesting interview with him and you're going to see a lot of this just coming straight from him you know one of the things he was big on was not sticking to any particular style or way of making photographs for very long he would shoot for a while and when he felt he'd kind of exhausted a subject he would change things up completely and go different direction I think this is really interesting too so for instance you know Symons early work we'll look at was these organic nature reflected images that were shot on me by 10:00 and then later you know he got tired of shooting that so he went and shot thirty five-millimeter and went to the streets and did something different and I think this is interesting and particularly that relationship with his camera that it was never one camera it was really I think in this case with Callahan the artist transcending the tools and that's so important and it's so out of vogue right now I mean tools are everything it seems and gear is fun but you know Callahan reminds us that that it's a vision and an image that is a reflection of the photographer and not gadgets and getting caught up in the technical aspects of things and I think that's really important in a lot of ways so without further ado I want to look at some Harry's work and I want to do a little bit of an analysis of this because I think on analytical level you have a photographer who sticks to a lot of you know very I don't calm safe conventions but classic composition techniques you know use of line shape contrast drawing your eye to different things in the composition and he does it in a way where he's able to put his own stamp on it and this is what's really difficult and but I think it makes sense because we did a lot of composition episodes Oh in the last year so and this really brings that together because they're not a paint-by-numbers set of rules for making art they're simply some guidelines some things to follow some rules of interest and for the for the eye and visual composition and I think Callahan really brings that home and makes that work so without further ado let's go over and check out the work of Harry Callahan so we're going to look at the work of Harry Callahan today and once again I'm using Pinterest if you're new to the show and you are not familiar with this I like to use Pinterest because it allows me to bookmark images and it allows me to use it as an excellent study aid as a teaching aid when I work on these shows and if you are interested you can go check out exactly what I'm talking about if you go check out my Pinterest account and some people figured that if they follow me on Pinterest they can indeed seeing what we are going to talk about in the next show so anyway it's kind of fun Maya Pinterest account is Pinterest comm slash Ted Forbes that's my account and when you get here you're going to see everything organized in what they call boards and the newer boards are at the bottom so scroll all the way down and you'll see Harry Callahan and we go ahead and click on that and we're going to go backwards on this today I know that might be a little stranger really you know it's the order I put them on here but I did a little bit better job of organizing these today and I want to look at four distinct periods of callaghan's work and this is important because I think it shows the depth of the well the depth of the range she was able to shoot with he did a lot of different things in his lifetime and you know Callahan has gone on record is saying that's really what he wanted to do is leave a body of work that represented life and a lot of that for him required change and when he kind of exhausted or grew tired of a subject he would switch to something else and that could have been you know shooting eight-by-ten then going to 35-millimeter or going back to large format or and it also meant the subject matter strongly changed as well as the conceptual nature of what he was doing but I want to look at these early works first a lot of these nature types of works now Callahan met Alfred Stieglitz on several occasions in his life and part of the interview that I mentioned earlier he talks about being influenced by Stieglitz's cloud series and if you're not familiar these there's one flip over real quick these are this is a statelets image it a whole series these cloud images and personally I think these don't do it justice to see these on a computer screen because the size of the prints and the quality of the prints is really interesting and they're not printed very large they're fairly small and I think that that is what makes them kind of a sense of magical quality to them because you know you have something that's large and galumphing like a sky and it's actually presented in a very small scale so I think it really has a beautiful juxtaposition but either way Stieglitz did a series of clouds and Callahan so he was very inspired by that and decided to go for something that was found in nature and experiment with that and what he came up with what you're going to see is a series of very high contrast dark images that make these wonderful line studies and this is one of them and a lot of these were you know eight by ten camera and and he would do things like shoot so this one's kind of small but this is a reflection of reeds and water some of them are lighter in nature some of them are darker in nature and I think some of these are just gorgeous and what you start to see here from a compositional sense because I think Callahan was one of those guys and this is why I liked him so much but he had such a strong root in kind of classical composition techniques which we've talked about a lot in previous episodes on this show and he was able to do a lot of these classical composition things but put his own stamp on them and his own personality and really take them somewhere new now a lot of what you're going to see in here is we're looking at these line studies and you know there have been curators and critics that you know harken these these are grass and snow but two abstracts right which is essentially what we're getting out of here and these abstracts have kind of been compared with Jackson Pollock's sometimes and some of the abstract painters who were working you know roughly around the same time in the 40s or some into the 50s and while certainly Jackson Pollock is you know more busy but they're essentially the drip paintings could be compared to these as line studies and so what he's doing here is he you can't tell you sir reads in water especially that I've told you that but they really start treating nature as abstraction in this organic type of composition and I really love the high key high contrast nature of these I think they're really lends them the beauty that's something special and you can see this not just with close-up macro types of things but also with trees and there's a whole series of these and they are just beautiful and even Callahan thinks that these were some of his strongest images and you know I guess through the eyes that we have today they're a little bit different in the sense they may not be as groundbreaking as they probably were at that time but I think there's a real beauty in these and some of the abstracts I think still have not been beat I mean this is just something that's just gorgeous the people strive for with photography you start to see those of this use of line later this is an image that obviously have a parking lot in the snow that shot from above Callahan spent oh oh the bulk of his formative years shooting pictures in Chicago although he moved later and I think some of this int work these studies of this organic nature start to influence what he's doing later with things Callahan really enjoyed a huge sense of repetition and pattern and one of the things he start experimenting with a little bit later or multiple exposures and this is a technique that not a lot of guys are known for or guys or gals I mean this is just something that you know it's difficult to compose with on a camera because you really have to get used to how this works but I think what you're starting to see here and I think this gets more into jackson pollock territory or ab x for that matter but you're starting to see these repetitions patterns and things that take something that is you know very you know objective is a object in composition and they turn into an abstract and so you're going to see a lot of work with patterns and a lot with these double exposures triple exposures you know etc which I find really interesting this one's wild because it's just like you know this complete collage type of work and you know Callahan was amazing at that and I think he really there's something about the pattern the repetition that you see in these it's not just taking double exposures and I think that's really interesting here's a self-portrait shot and what you're going to start to see too with these multiple exposures and I think this is really where Harry started taking this to the next level is you start to see something that that really only painters have have worked with which is actually manipulating the image in camera I mean obviously the self-portrait you're seeing the top part of you know shoulders up with Callahan and then his feet in the same image but what he starts doing later as you can see in some of these images is starts creating kind of frames and compositions within compositions and this is a style particularly an illustration that was no bigger in the late sixties early 70s it creates a really wonderful sense of composition what is curious to me about this and I think what makes it really cool is that Callahan he's he's using image manipulation which typically with more the film generation of guys you think of guys like Jerry you Suleman who were doing this in the darkroom and Cal I was doing the same camera that's just the type of photographer he was and some really interesting things start coming out of this this nude silhouette of his wife Eleanor superimposed with the organic nature it's just basically a shot of some grass growing on the ground but they really give quite a bit of breadth and complexity I think to the composition later on this this carried itself to a brilliant set of groundbreaking images were there almost like cubist type introductions of somewhere between maybe cubism and and you know somewhere between you know cubism and probably something like you know Asher where you really get a sense of disorientation and abstraction just with simple shapes and image and again you can still see that you know we talked about position techniques on the show we talked a lot about line and a lot about shape and I think there's a lot you can learn from that and looking at Callahans work just simply because a lot exists and these were really groundbreaking another kind of era that we start growing into with callahan a-- this is another beautiful I think this is a good crossover image for what I'm about to talk about too is this sense of depth in the sense of focal point in the image and as you can see here this is another double exposure but it's a figure in some kind of light lit doorway or window superimposed onto a nature type study of you know an abstract of weeds growing and I start I think you start to see a lot of this is a little bit across orange but Union obviously the hard lines here but what is the focal point in this image well the first thing that grabs your your interest and this is where the sense of depth comes in is where the tea joins on these two lines that are painted on the street but really what you see secondary that I think really is the focus or the star of this image are these little tiny cars particularly the one on the road that looks like there may be two and this is really interesting because you know when I did the composition series one of the things when you consider what we refer to as figure-ground relationships so the ground is for instance the paper the image is printed on it's you know it's the area of the image and the figures are the objects that appear within that image well you have two points of interest here particularly with the intersection of these two lines that is closer to an edge than it is in the middle and these cars are really close to an edge now when you have things that you're able to isolate like that it does draw attention to them in emphasis and it creates more interest than if the headline that up in the middle of the picture for instance and I think you start to really realize and understand that also with some of these with this focal point there is a sense of minimalism that comes in now it's not minimalism in the 1970s Donald Judd's sense necessarily or even the Japanese aesthetic that you know influenced a great deal of that but their minimalist in that there there's no distracting information in these so you see these two figures that are walking in separate directions that are crossing at the point where the photo is taken that's the decisive moment and really there's not much in the photo that's distracting that isn't in place so for instance this you know were these wires it seems like a piece of wiring up plywood come together here this this round object that's on there it is on the plane where these two figures are crossing thus is the crack in the wall behind the rest of texture and what we would refer to as negative space so really draws you in I think he had such a great natural sense of this but I think it was I think he thought about it much in the way that bris aunt thought about it and was really good at pre visualizing and knew what he was trying to get with a particular scene Cal Hannon we haven't seen much of these foes yet but spent a great deal of time shooting his wife and his daughter around Chicago Illinois and Barbara I believe is the daughter's name and beautiful stuff she was his main subject his wife was and in fact here's a new Tavella lying on a bed and I think again this is a such a beautiful picture for so many reasons first of all the soft focus adds a you know the pictorialist influence on there that just is beautiful but really what you see are just the outline of the knees that are drawn up and it's just a beautiful figure study but again creating those focal points that sense of depth here's another one with Eleanor it's a nude study looking out a window again look how large her figure is in in relationship to the rest of the composition it's not it's very small and she's down in the corner but because of where she is it starts drawing emphasis to it the beautiful light coming in the window is just wonderful studies of composition and also you have some of these landscapes these sand dunes that just you know again this minimalist quality on the horizon right down the middle and some you know you very much I think probably influenced and you see this later in the works by hero see who Roshi Sugimoto and probably even Tom Burrell and someone like the Jones Beach pictures that he did great stuff and an urban landscape as well and again I think this one's interesting I'm guessing this was probably shot in Chicago with the era but essentially this big black building that becomes the point of interest with a crowd of cars around it you know taking something that's not really typically what people would think of is making a beautiful photograph and doing that just that with it some shots of Eleanor and Barbara which I think are beautiful too and some of these are almost snapshots in nature but their composition studies and they do interesting things the pole dividing the image is this one with the car behind it and this use of symmetry but at the same time asymmetrical in some ways because you have a car over this side on this side and the shape changes the building absolutely beautiful I think you know culminating in an image like this of his wife and daughter and these just two figures in this shimmer of light that comes through this just a little sliver of sunlight and just simply beautiful and again in Chicago with this one which is just absolutely gorgeous but you know a weird kind of snapshot feel to them but it's tied in with you know such a wonderful sense of composition and you can see some of these are four by five some of my 35 you know he changed things around later in life he actually started working with color and he again wasn't one of those people who's a colorist that was experimenting with it before it was really cool and before was accepted in the art world and we talked about that so far with people like Saul leader who went completely unnoticed until probably about the 1990s and even way mag Liston who was the guy who kind of was on the cusp of changing that for the fine art world and having work that was seen but I think you know what I'm seeing in callaghan's work here and this is just simply kind of the way I've see it but you're seeing a lot of these techniques that he's done with black and white for all these years that are just kind of taking on a new life in color so for instance the multiple exposures and the way you see color in here with the taxicab yellow and then the blue sky that comes in and and the disorientation via that multiple exposure I think is just simply gorgeous and you see these in a lot of these works I think it's interesting that the focal point in here is there's Harry something in the middle of Taylor and obviously Harry Callahan is who we're looking at and so it's almost like a odo to the photographer himself again in the midst of all this chaos finding a way compositionally to bring attention to the woman's face that's directly in the middle of the photograph looking at shoes and they're absolutely wonderful um one of the things he mentions on the interview from the older interview that I'm a link to on YouTube is he would you know he was asked about doing these color images he said well the technical process was so weird early on sometimes trying to reproduce color accurately was just so strange to the eye and so one thing he found that he enjoyed a lot was making abstraction x' from neon lights not shown at night and you see that clearly in this where you have it's just dancing nights or something like that the top and it's really abstracted around it if it didn't have that that's that's kind of your grounding to what's real and there rest of it is simply a beautiful abstract and in stuff like this that is almost more eggless tell me in if I can make a word out of that which is you know the back of a woman walking down the street and I love this picture mainly because it's such a wonderful kind of study in shape almost with the woman's dress but also because it's a real cinema graphic or cinematography sorry I'm can talk today viewing the things it's almost more like something you'd see in a movie theater like you expect to be walking with this woman you wonder where we're going and I think this picture tells quite a story even though it's fairly early color image so anyway looked at kind of four distinct different styles that Callahan worked in and there's more he was extremely prolific photographer and when he died in 99 I mean there's thousands hundreds of thousands of images I believe right around a hundred thousand actually that were actually donated to the center for creative photography out in Arizona and they are kind of the caretakers and the stewards of his you know Oubre of negatives and positives and slides and whatnot and what a lot what a legacy and I also think you know one of the things he says he strived for was actually just creating a life in pictures and some of that required change at different points but it was reflective of a level of interest and just a love and a passion for life itself and I think that you get these out of these I think Callahan you know despite his lack of commercial successes and things like that he was just a great photographer and he didn't do it for the commercial success of it all he did it because he loved it and his career was mainly after Chrysler teaching at two different schools but you know left such a legacy and I think that's important so that is the work of Harry Callahan so I think Callahan for me is important on several different levels I think you know he's not he's a big name in the history of photography but he's not a big rock star name you know what I mean he's not an Ansel Adams or he's not a Stieglitz or even a second but he's one of those people that you know I just think he's very real in a lot of ways he came at this later in life a little bit at first he wasn't really prolific that came in time and you know he represents I think in a lot of ways and I hope you get this from this too but but he's he's very real in the sense that he shows us that yes this can be done don't get discouraged and I love the way that he would change things up every so often and I think that attributed to well one what he was able to do as a photographer even though maybe this varying the subjects and varying the mediums probably kept him from you know being I guess on a very simple level one of the great masters of photography even though I think he's a great master photography I would compare him if you're into jazz music at all he's like a West Montgomery you know somebody who's brilliant but he's not a mainstream name and I think that's what's fun about doing the shows hopefully I'm bringing some of this to some of you who haven't heard of people like this before and I think we've covered a lot of names like that this year with salt leader and Egleston not so much he was a pretty big name but you know maybe Fred Harris all people like that and well you know this is a little bit departure from those even though he was a colorist as well you know I think there's so much you can learn from Callahan so much you can take away and the other thing that I think is so honest and so sincere about Callahan is they're really you can tell this is a man who just loved making pictures and did his whole life doing that spence whole life doing that and it left behind a body of work that's just very reflective of I think probably his personality quiet interest introspective at least that's how it comes off in the interview that exists and just a very beautiful mind a very beautiful person and just this wonderful quality to his work so anyway hope you found that interesting today we will continue on next week so anyway guys once again spin the art of photography thanks for watching I'll see you next time latereverybody welcome back to another episode of the art of photography my name is Ted Forbes and today we are going to talk about Harry Callahan and now I'm not talking about Dury Harry Callahan the Clint Eastwood character I'm talking about the American photographer Harry Callahan Kelley has a very interesting photographer to me he's one of my favorites and this is one this episode's when I'm researching and doing it I mean you know you dig into a photographer's images and some of these people you know you're familiar with a lot of their work but you go in and there's such a breadth and refreshing revisit to a lot of these from me at least and I just think the world of Callahan and I think he's very influential in me in a number of ways I there's a lot of very likeable things about him he was a guy who started later in life as a photographer he was well into his 30s before he really got serious about it and I think that you know he just you have somebody who just had this complete passion for creating images and the methods that he went to do those the way he changed his style up several times and the fact that he never was in this for commercial gain or fame or fortune or anything like that you have a guy who just shot a lot of amazing work knew some amazing people and eventually ended up taking two different teaching positions but basically he was born in 1912 in Detroit Michigan and one of his first jobs he worked as a clerk for Chrysler Motor Corporation I believe and was there that he met his future wife Eleanor and when they were married she later became one of his most famous subjects he did an enormous amount of pictures with her and then later his daughter Barbara and a lot of his daily regimen when he lived in Chicago was to get up in the morning and he would go for walks with them and shoot portraits and these kind of snapshot looks and we'll see a few of those today and they're amazing but you have somebody that was just I think brilliant in a lot of ways there is a video that was shot probably in the 80s it's an interview from visions and images I believe was the name of the show and it's very dated but it's a very interesting interview with him and you're going to see a lot of this just coming straight from him you know one of the things he was big on was not sticking to any particular style or way of making photographs for very long he would shoot for a while and when he felt he'd kind of exhausted a subject he would change things up completely and go different direction I think this is really interesting too so for instance you know Symons early work we'll look at was these organic nature reflected images that were shot on me by 10:00 and then later you know he got tired of shooting that so he went and shot thirty five-millimeter and went to the streets and did something different and I think this is interesting and particularly that relationship with his camera that it was never one camera it was really I think in this case with Callahan the artist transcending the tools and that's so important and it's so out of vogue right now I mean tools are everything it seems and gear is fun but you know Callahan reminds us that that it's a vision and an image that is a reflection of the photographer and not gadgets and getting caught up in the technical aspects of things and I think that's really important in a lot of ways so without further ado I want to look at some Harry's work and I want to do a little bit of an analysis of this because I think on analytical level you have a photographer who sticks to a lot of you know very I don't calm safe conventions but classic composition techniques you know use of line shape contrast drawing your eye to different things in the composition and he does it in a way where he's able to put his own stamp on it and this is what's really difficult and but I think it makes sense because we did a lot of composition episodes Oh in the last year so and this really brings that together because they're not a paint-by-numbers set of rules for making art they're simply some guidelines some things to follow some rules of interest and for the for the eye and visual composition and I think Callahan really brings that home and makes that work so without further ado let's go over and check out the work of Harry Callahan so we're going to look at the work of Harry Callahan today and once again I'm using Pinterest if you're new to the show and you are not familiar with this I like to use Pinterest because it allows me to bookmark images and it allows me to use it as an excellent study aid as a teaching aid when I work on these shows and if you are interested you can go check out exactly what I'm talking about if you go check out my Pinterest account and some people figured that if they follow me on Pinterest they can indeed seeing what we are going to talk about in the next show so anyway it's kind of fun Maya Pinterest account is Pinterest comm slash Ted Forbes that's my account and when you get here you're going to see everything organized in what they call boards and the newer boards are at the bottom so scroll all the way down and you'll see Harry Callahan and we go ahead and click on that and we're going to go backwards on this today I know that might be a little stranger really you know it's the order I put them on here but I did a little bit better job of organizing these today and I want to look at four distinct periods of callaghan's work and this is important because I think it shows the depth of the well the depth of the range she was able to shoot with he did a lot of different things in his lifetime and you know Callahan has gone on record is saying that's really what he wanted to do is leave a body of work that represented life and a lot of that for him required change and when he kind of exhausted or grew tired of a subject he would switch to something else and that could have been you know shooting eight-by-ten then going to 35-millimeter or going back to large format or and it also meant the subject matter strongly changed as well as the conceptual nature of what he was doing but I want to look at these early works first a lot of these nature types of works now Callahan met Alfred Stieglitz on several occasions in his life and part of the interview that I mentioned earlier he talks about being influenced by Stieglitz's cloud series and if you're not familiar these there's one flip over real quick these are this is a statelets image it a whole series these cloud images and personally I think these don't do it justice to see these on a computer screen because the size of the prints and the quality of the prints is really interesting and they're not printed very large they're fairly small and I think that that is what makes them kind of a sense of magical quality to them because you know you have something that's large and galumphing like a sky and it's actually presented in a very small scale so I think it really has a beautiful juxtaposition but either way Stieglitz did a series of clouds and Callahan so he was very inspired by that and decided to go for something that was found in nature and experiment with that and what he came up with what you're going to see is a series of very high contrast dark images that make these wonderful line studies and this is one of them and a lot of these were you know eight by ten camera and and he would do things like shoot so this one's kind of small but this is a reflection of reeds and water some of them are lighter in nature some of them are darker in nature and I think some of these are just gorgeous and what you start to see here from a compositional sense because I think Callahan was one of those guys and this is why I liked him so much but he had such a strong root in kind of classical composition techniques which we've talked about a lot in previous episodes on this show and he was able to do a lot of these classical composition things but put his own stamp on them and his own personality and really take them somewhere new now a lot of what you're going to see in here is we're looking at these line studies and you know there have been curators and critics that you know harken these these are grass and snow but two abstracts right which is essentially what we're getting out of here and these abstracts have kind of been compared with Jackson Pollock's sometimes and some of the abstract painters who were working you know roughly around the same time in the 40s or some into the 50s and while certainly Jackson Pollock is you know more busy but they're essentially the drip paintings could be compared to these as line studies and so what he's doing here is he you can't tell you sir reads in water especially that I've told you that but they really start treating nature as abstraction in this organic type of composition and I really love the high key high contrast nature of these I think they're really lends them the beauty that's something special and you can see this not just with close-up macro types of things but also with trees and there's a whole series of these and they are just beautiful and even Callahan thinks that these were some of his strongest images and you know I guess through the eyes that we have today they're a little bit different in the sense they may not be as groundbreaking as they probably were at that time but I think there's a real beauty in these and some of the abstracts I think still have not been beat I mean this is just something that's just gorgeous the people strive for with photography you start to see those of this use of line later this is an image that obviously have a parking lot in the snow that shot from above Callahan spent oh oh the bulk of his formative years shooting pictures in Chicago although he moved later and I think some of this int work these studies of this organic nature start to influence what he's doing later with things Callahan really enjoyed a huge sense of repetition and pattern and one of the things he start experimenting with a little bit later or multiple exposures and this is a technique that not a lot of guys are known for or guys or gals I mean this is just something that you know it's difficult to compose with on a camera because you really have to get used to how this works but I think what you're starting to see here and I think this gets more into jackson pollock territory or ab x for that matter but you're starting to see these repetitions patterns and things that take something that is you know very you know objective is a object in composition and they turn into an abstract and so you're going to see a lot of work with patterns and a lot with these double exposures triple exposures you know etc which I find really interesting this one's wild because it's just like you know this complete collage type of work and you know Callahan was amazing at that and I think he really there's something about the pattern the repetition that you see in these it's not just taking double exposures and I think that's really interesting here's a self-portrait shot and what you're going to start to see too with these multiple exposures and I think this is really where Harry started taking this to the next level is you start to see something that that really only painters have have worked with which is actually manipulating the image in camera I mean obviously the self-portrait you're seeing the top part of you know shoulders up with Callahan and then his feet in the same image but what he starts doing later as you can see in some of these images is starts creating kind of frames and compositions within compositions and this is a style particularly an illustration that was no bigger in the late sixties early 70s it creates a really wonderful sense of composition what is curious to me about this and I think what makes it really cool is that Callahan he's he's using image manipulation which typically with more the film generation of guys you think of guys like Jerry you Suleman who were doing this in the darkroom and Cal I was doing the same camera that's just the type of photographer he was and some really interesting things start coming out of this this nude silhouette of his wife Eleanor superimposed with the organic nature it's just basically a shot of some grass growing on the ground but they really give quite a bit of breadth and complexity I think to the composition later on this this carried itself to a brilliant set of groundbreaking images were there almost like cubist type introductions of somewhere between maybe cubism and and you know somewhere between you know cubism and probably something like you know Asher where you really get a sense of disorientation and abstraction just with simple shapes and image and again you can still see that you know we talked about position techniques on the show we talked a lot about line and a lot about shape and I think there's a lot you can learn from that and looking at Callahans work just simply because a lot exists and these were really groundbreaking another kind of era that we start growing into with callahan a-- this is another beautiful I think this is a good crossover image for what I'm about to talk about too is this sense of depth in the sense of focal point in the image and as you can see here this is another double exposure but it's a figure in some kind of light lit doorway or window superimposed onto a nature type study of you know an abstract of weeds growing and I start I think you start to see a lot of this is a little bit across orange but Union obviously the hard lines here but what is the focal point in this image well the first thing that grabs your your interest and this is where the sense of depth comes in is where the tea joins on these two lines that are painted on the street but really what you see secondary that I think really is the focus or the star of this image are these little tiny cars particularly the one on the road that looks like there may be two and this is really interesting because you know when I did the composition series one of the things when you consider what we refer to as figure-ground relationships so the ground is for instance the paper the image is printed on it's you know it's the area of the image and the figures are the objects that appear within that image well you have two points of interest here particularly with the intersection of these two lines that is closer to an edge than it is in the middle and these cars are really close to an edge now when you have things that you're able to isolate like that it does draw attention to them in emphasis and it creates more interest than if the headline that up in the middle of the picture for instance and I think you start to really realize and understand that also with some of these with this focal point there is a sense of minimalism that comes in now it's not minimalism in the 1970s Donald Judd's sense necessarily or even the Japanese aesthetic that you know influenced a great deal of that but their minimalist in that there there's no distracting information in these so you see these two figures that are walking in separate directions that are crossing at the point where the photo is taken that's the decisive moment and really there's not much in the photo that's distracting that isn't in place so for instance this you know were these wires it seems like a piece of wiring up plywood come together here this this round object that's on there it is on the plane where these two figures are crossing thus is the crack in the wall behind the rest of texture and what we would refer to as negative space so really draws you in I think he had such a great natural sense of this but I think it was I think he thought about it much in the way that bris aunt thought about it and was really good at pre visualizing and knew what he was trying to get with a particular scene Cal Hannon we haven't seen much of these foes yet but spent a great deal of time shooting his wife and his daughter around Chicago Illinois and Barbara I believe is the daughter's name and beautiful stuff she was his main subject his wife was and in fact here's a new Tavella lying on a bed and I think again this is a such a beautiful picture for so many reasons first of all the soft focus adds a you know the pictorialist influence on there that just is beautiful but really what you see are just the outline of the knees that are drawn up and it's just a beautiful figure study but again creating those focal points that sense of depth here's another one with Eleanor it's a nude study looking out a window again look how large her figure is in in relationship to the rest of the composition it's not it's very small and she's down in the corner but because of where she is it starts drawing emphasis to it the beautiful light coming in the window is just wonderful studies of composition and also you have some of these landscapes these sand dunes that just you know again this minimalist quality on the horizon right down the middle and some you know you very much I think probably influenced and you see this later in the works by hero see who Roshi Sugimoto and probably even Tom Burrell and someone like the Jones Beach pictures that he did great stuff and an urban landscape as well and again I think this one's interesting I'm guessing this was probably shot in Chicago with the era but essentially this big black building that becomes the point of interest with a crowd of cars around it you know taking something that's not really typically what people would think of is making a beautiful photograph and doing that just that with it some shots of Eleanor and Barbara which I think are beautiful too and some of these are almost snapshots in nature but their composition studies and they do interesting things the pole dividing the image is this one with the car behind it and this use of symmetry but at the same time asymmetrical in some ways because you have a car over this side on this side and the shape changes the building absolutely beautiful I think you know culminating in an image like this of his wife and daughter and these just two figures in this shimmer of light that comes through this just a little sliver of sunlight and just simply beautiful and again in Chicago with this one which is just absolutely gorgeous but you know a weird kind of snapshot feel to them but it's tied in with you know such a wonderful sense of composition and you can see some of these are four by five some of my 35 you know he changed things around later in life he actually started working with color and he again wasn't one of those people who's a colorist that was experimenting with it before it was really cool and before was accepted in the art world and we talked about that so far with people like Saul leader who went completely unnoticed until probably about the 1990s and even way mag Liston who was the guy who kind of was on the cusp of changing that for the fine art world and having work that was seen but I think you know what I'm seeing in callaghan's work here and this is just simply kind of the way I've see it but you're seeing a lot of these techniques that he's done with black and white for all these years that are just kind of taking on a new life in color so for instance the multiple exposures and the way you see color in here with the taxicab yellow and then the blue sky that comes in and and the disorientation via that multiple exposure I think is just simply gorgeous and you see these in a lot of these works I think it's interesting that the focal point in here is there's Harry something in the middle of Taylor and obviously Harry Callahan is who we're looking at and so it's almost like a odo to the photographer himself again in the midst of all this chaos finding a way compositionally to bring attention to the woman's face that's directly in the middle of the photograph looking at shoes and they're absolutely wonderful um one of the things he mentions on the interview from the older interview that I'm a link to on YouTube is he would you know he was asked about doing these color images he said well the technical process was so weird early on sometimes trying to reproduce color accurately was just so strange to the eye and so one thing he found that he enjoyed a lot was making abstraction x' from neon lights not shown at night and you see that clearly in this where you have it's just dancing nights or something like that the top and it's really abstracted around it if it didn't have that that's that's kind of your grounding to what's real and there rest of it is simply a beautiful abstract and in stuff like this that is almost more eggless tell me in if I can make a word out of that which is you know the back of a woman walking down the street and I love this picture mainly because it's such a wonderful kind of study in shape almost with the woman's dress but also because it's a real cinema graphic or cinematography sorry I'm can talk today viewing the things it's almost more like something you'd see in a movie theater like you expect to be walking with this woman you wonder where we're going and I think this picture tells quite a story even though it's fairly early color image so anyway looked at kind of four distinct different styles that Callahan worked in and there's more he was extremely prolific photographer and when he died in 99 I mean there's thousands hundreds of thousands of images I believe right around a hundred thousand actually that were actually donated to the center for creative photography out in Arizona and they are kind of the caretakers and the stewards of his you know Oubre of negatives and positives and slides and whatnot and what a lot what a legacy and I also think you know one of the things he says he strived for was actually just creating a life in pictures and some of that required change at different points but it was reflective of a level of interest and just a love and a passion for life itself and I think that you get these out of these I think Callahan you know despite his lack of commercial successes and things like that he was just a great photographer and he didn't do it for the commercial success of it all he did it because he loved it and his career was mainly after Chrysler teaching at two different schools but you know left such a legacy and I think that's important so that is the work of Harry Callahan so I think Callahan for me is important on several different levels I think you know he's not he's a big name in the history of photography but he's not a big rock star name you know what I mean he's not an Ansel Adams or he's not a Stieglitz or even a second but he's one of those people that you know I just think he's very real in a lot of ways he came at this later in life a little bit at first he wasn't really prolific that came in time and you know he represents I think in a lot of ways and I hope you get this from this too but but he's he's very real in the sense that he shows us that yes this can be done don't get discouraged and I love the way that he would change things up every so often and I think that attributed to well one what he was able to do as a photographer even though maybe this varying the subjects and varying the mediums probably kept him from you know being I guess on a very simple level one of the great masters of photography even though I think he's a great master photography I would compare him if you're into jazz music at all he's like a West Montgomery you know somebody who's brilliant but he's not a mainstream name and I think that's what's fun about doing the shows hopefully I'm bringing some of this to some of you who haven't heard of people like this before and I think we've covered a lot of names like that this year with salt leader and Egleston not so much he was a pretty big name but you know maybe Fred Harris all people like that and well you know this is a little bit departure from those even though he was a colorist as well you know I think there's so much you can learn from Callahan so much you can take away and the other thing that I think is so honest and so sincere about Callahan is they're really you can tell this is a man who just loved making pictures and did his whole life doing that spence whole life doing that and it left behind a body of work that's just very reflective of I think probably his personality quiet interest introspective at least that's how it comes off in the interview that exists and just a very beautiful mind a very beautiful person and just this wonderful quality to his work so anyway hope you found that interesting today we will continue on next week so anyway guys once again spin the art of photography thanks for watching I'll see you next time later\n"