Harry Callahan
				American, 1912-1999
		Website about the artist: no website
			Introduction
			Born in Detroit, Callahan studied at Michigan State University before going to work for the Chrysler Motor Parts Corporation. In 1936, he married Eleanor Knapp, who later became the subject of some of his most important images. Callahan bought his first camera in 1938, and credits Ansel Adams' visit to the Detroit Photo Guild in 1941 as pivotal in his decision to become a photographer. Although he had almost no formal artistic training he received encouragement early in his career from such luminaries as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. At the invitation of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Callahan joined the staff of the Institute of Design in Chicago (later known as the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1946. In 1948 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Self-taught in photography, Harry Callahan enjoys [Callahan died in 1999] a long and influential career which began in 1938. After studying engineering at Michigan State University he worked first for the Chrysler Corporation and then at the General Motors Photographic Laboratories in Detroit. Callahan's early photographic work was influenced by Ansel Adams, whom Callahan heard lecture, and by the life of Alfred Stieglitz. In 1946 he met Moholy-Nagy and joined the faculty of Chicago's Institute of Design, becoming chairman of the photography department in 1949. He left Chicago in 1961 to become chairman of the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design, serving in that capacity until 1973 and continuing to teach there until 1977. Harry Callahan's work is an exception, for it draws us ever more insistently inward toward the center of Callahan's private sensibility. This sensibility is expressed in his perception of subject matter that is remarkably personal and restricted in its range. For thirty years Callahan has photographed his wife and child, the streets of the cities in which he has lived, and details of the pastoral landscapes into which he has periodically escaped - materials so close at hand, so universally and obviously accessible, that one might have supposed that a dedicated photographer could exhaust their potential in a fraction of that time. Yet Callahan has repeatedly made these simple experiences new again by virtue of the precision of his feeling. The point is not merely that Callahan has responded faithfully as a photographer to the quality of his own life, or merely, even, that photography has been his method of focusing the meaning of that life. The point is that for Harry Callahan photography has been a way of living - his way of meeting and making peace with the day. Callahan's work is personally oriented; many of his pictures artistically interpret his family relationships, especially portraits of his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Barbara. His early work experimented with representational abstraction; recent work in color includes additional subject matter, both city and landscapes as well as multiple exposures.