|
One cool career
Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work is published as the catalogue for an eponymous exhibition which is on show at the Centre for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, until early May. The show then travels to Chicago. The work is drawn from the CCP’s Callahan archives (he died in 1999), and is a retrospective of his career which seeks to explore his practice by the inclusion of his experiments and contact sheets. In a career spanning 60 years, Callahan became a central figure in mid-twentieth century modernism and an influential teacher of photography. The book is a very high quality production and includes a foreword by John Szarkowski, long-time director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, now a photographer; the author Britt Salvesen, is curator at the CCP. As Szarkowski writes in his foreword: “Of all the notable photographers of the twentieth century, surely Callahan is the coolest. The emotional temperature of his work belongs to the upper edge of the North Temperate Zone. His pictures do not bully us with pathos, or with teutonic authority, or sweep us away with Mediterranean fervour, or seduce us with honeyed rhythms. They merely state with simple precision their artistic case.” And the evidence is all here, beautifully reproduced in this very reasonably priced book.
Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work, by Britt Salvesen, is published by the Centre for Creative Photography in association with Yale University Press, £30 hardback, ISBN 0-300-11332-3.
|
|
|
