History of Photography

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How to Hold a Camera: Harry Callahans Early

Abstractions

Brendan Fay

To cite this article: Brendan Fay (2015) How to Hold a Camera: Harry Callahans Early
Abstractions, History of Photography, 39:2, 160-176, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2015.1032537

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2015.1032537

Published online: 01 Jun 2015.

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 How to Hold a Camera: Harry
Callahans Early Abstractions
Brendan Fay
I would like to thank Matthew Biro,
Barbara Callahan, Kate Elswit, Robin
Kelsey, Sarah M. Miller, Leslie Squyres
and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of
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Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford

This article argues that bodycamera relationships issues of holding, mobility University for their encouragement and
and display informed the abstract qualities of some of Harry Callahans early assistance in developing this article.
photographs from the 1940s. While these pictures have clear roots in earlier
photographic precedents, they also engage problems related to those addressed Email for correspondence: penfold@umich.edu
by abstract painters of the same decade. The article positions Callahans photo-
graphs as an independent contribution to this periods exploration of bodily 1 See Eric Bryant, The Indecisive Image,
experience and abstraction, but also suggests how camera-based photography Art in America, 107:3 (March 2008),
from these years might complement and expand recent conversations about 10611; Lyle Rexer, The Edge of Vision: The
camera-less or process-based photographic abstraction. Rise of Abstraction in Photography, New
York: Aperture 2009; and Matthew
Keywords: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (18951946), Harry Callahan (191299), Institute Witkovsky, Another History, Artforum,
of Design, photography and movement, camera design, modernism, abstraction 48:7 (March 2010), 21321 and 274. Rexers
historical chapters include pictorialist
and mid-twentieth-century examples,
but his account of contemporary
Photographys relationship to abstraction has been a topic of renewed interest in photographic abstraction privileges process
recent years a shift marked by widespread experimentation with photographic experimentation and questions of medium
materials and by new questions about the definitions and limits of photographic definition. Witkovskys account partly
practice. These developments have been framed as a response to the rise of digital builds upon an exchange of texts in Words
Without Pictures, ed. Alex Klein, Los
technologies, but also as the return of a cyclical phenomenon. Given the prevalence Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of
of photograms and other forms of direct manipulation in contemporary photo- Art 2009 see Walead Beshty Abstracting
graphy, the historical frameworks assembled to make sense of newer work tend to Photography, 292315 and George Baker,
locate their key precedents in the 1920s and 1960s.1 Recent conversations about Photography and Abstraction, 35879.
2 For a canonical example of the former,
photography and abstraction have been less concerned, by contrast, to account for which continues to provide a substantial
work produced in the middle decades of the twentieth century or for the opera- counterpoint to monographic scholarship
tions of abstraction within straight photography. Scholarship specific to the mid- on Callahan, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau,
century period in the USA, for its part, has long taken for granted a degree of The Armed Vision Disarmed: Radical
Formalism from Weapon to Style (1983),
similarity between certain modes of modernist photography and contemporaneous in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories
abstract painting. Framing this connection as a matter of derivation, as critical of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton,
writers have, sometimes precludes careful analysis of the photographs in question; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1989,
framing it as a matter of serendipity, as sympathetic writers have, may sidestep 82106. For a recent example of the latter,
see Ann Temkin, Abstract Expressionism at
detailed comparison of strategies of abstraction across media.2 Neither position the Museum of Modern Art, New York:
clarifies how photographys connections to abstract painting in this period might Museum of Modern Art 2010, 30.
be reconciled with its simultaneous debts to earlier photographic precedents. 3 See Beaumont Newhall, The History of
The early work of Harry Callahan offers a useful testing ground for these Photography: From 1839 to the Present Day,
revised and enlarged edition, New York:
problems. During his formative years in the 1940s, as both admirers and critics Museum of Modern Art 1964, 200; and
have noted, he drew in equal measure upon US traditions of straight photography Solomon-Godeau, Armed Vision Disarmed,
and European traditions of experimental photography.3 Directly inspired by 99100. For Newhall this intersection pro-
Ansel Adams, through a 1941 workshop with the Detroit Photo Guild, while duced a formalism made convincing by the
discipline of straight photography, while for
indirectly absorbing the experimental ethos of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy through a Solomon-Godeau it marks an overturning of
circle of ambitious amateurs, Callahan occupied a strangely privileged position, the radical potential of Callahans experi-
given his lack of formal education and experience, with respect to dominant trends mental predecessors.

History of Photography, Volume 39, Number 2, May 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2015.1032537
# 2015 Taylor & Francis

4 For a detailed account of Callahans
early formation and Arthur Siegels role in
introducing modernist photography to
Detroit amateur circles, see John Pultz,
Harry Callahan and American
Photography, 19381990, PhD thesis,
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
1993, 188.
5 See Jacqueline Brody, Harry Callahan:
Questions, Print Collectors Newsletter, 7:6
(JanuaryFebruary 1977), 17475. Founded
by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as the New
Bauhaus in 1937 and reconstituted as the
School of Design in Chicago shortly
thereafter, the school had been known as
the Institute of Design since 1944. See
Elizabeth Siegel, Chronology, in Taken by
Design: Photographs from the Institute of
Design, 19371971, ed. David Travis and
Elizabeth Siegel, Chicago: Art Institute of
Chicago and University of Chicago Press
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2002, 24749; and Emma Stein, Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy and Chicagos War Industry:
Photographic Pedagogy at the New
Bauhaus, History of Photography, 38:4
(November 2014), 398417.
6 On Callahans strategy of alternating
cameras and subjects as a means of
generating new ideas, see Shelley Rice, An
Interview with Harry Callahan, Harry
Callahan, Tokyo: Seibu Museum of Art
1983, 1920. On strategies of deferred
agency in twentieth-century abstraction, see
Yve-Alain Bois, Strzeminski and Kobro: In
Search of Motivation, in Painting as Model,
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1990,
12355; Yve-Alain Bois, Ellsworth Kelly in
France: Anti-Composition in its Many
Guises, in Yve-Alain Bois, Jack Cowart and
Alfred Pacquement, Ellsworth Kelly: The
Years in France, Washington, DC: National
Gallery of Art 1992, 936; and Rosalind
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious,
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1993,
243308. For recent reviews of debates over
authorial control and agency in
photography theory and in art history, see
Diarmuid Costello and Dawn Philips,
Automatism, Causality and Realism:
Foundational Problems in the History of
Photography, Philosophy Compass, 4:1
(2009), 121; and Diarmuid Costello and
Margaret Iversen, Introduction:
Photography between Art History and
Philosophy, Critical Inquiry, 38:4 (Summer
2012), 67993.
7 Examples appear in Sally Stein, Harry
Callahan: Photographs in Color: The Years
19461978, Tucson: Center for Creative
Photography 1980; Harry Callahan: Color,
ed. Robert Tow and Ricker Winsor,
Providence, RI: Matrix 1980; and Sarah
Greenough, Harry Callahan, Washington,
DC: National Gallery of Art 1996.
Previously unpublished examples
considered here are drawn from a set of
unnumbered boxes of 35 mm colour
materials in the Harry Callahan Archive
(AG29), Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona (HCA/CCP).
How to Hold a Camera
in photography of this moment.4 In the span of only a few years Callahan
progressed from novice to advanced amateur to professional educator, trading in
camera clubs and a series of odd jobs in Detroit for a teaching position at Moholy-
Nagys experimental school in Chicago. During these transitional years he pro-
duced photographs that approached abstraction from multiple directions, includ-
ing stark, high-contrast renderings, complicated multiple exposures, and cropped
details of torn signs. The first of these modes, Callahans tendency toward graphic
rendering and linear design, played a key role in his formation and early public
image. Indeed, it was the emergence of this mode, around 1943, that marked
Callahans break with the technical precepts he had inherited from Adams and the
point at which he began to define an independent practice. His work of the
following years was marked in part by a recurring interest in line, as his new
colleagues at the Institute of Design described it on his arrival in 1946.5 The
graphic linearity found in this strain of Callahans work is often rooted in choices
about technique and subject matter; in certain cases, however, it also derives from
bodily concerns that invite dialogue with histories of abstraction.
Examining Callahans Camera Movements and Telephone Wires, two groups of
photographs that originated around 1945, this article demonstrates how their
abstraction emerged out of Callahans attention to bodycamera interactions.
The Camera Movements are photographs of city lights at night, made by moving
a 35 mm camera with an open shutter, and they invite consideration as a kind of
gestural abstraction. They are noteworthy, however, for the apparent constraints
placed on Callahans gestures, ultimately suggesting an attempt to coordinate his
movements with the cameras field of view. The Telephone Wires are high-contrast
renderings of overhead wiring, made primarily with a twin-lens Rolleicord and
secondarily with an 8 inch x 10 inch view camera, and they invite consideration as
a kind of abstraction concerned with perceptual ambiguity. Seeking out viewpoints
that confuse orientation and counteract perspective, they distil or thematise
Callahans experience of seeing through a ground glass in motion around his
body. Using three cameras in parallel 35 mm, medium-format, and view
Callahan seems to have been interested in testing and distilling his bodily relation-
ship to these devices, seizing on their divergent modes of display as one of the
variables that might inform his process. The two series thus attest to the generative
role of camera differences in Callahans early practice, suggesting one way that
straight photographic work might be linked to the importance of generative
strategies and problems of distributed agency in the history of abstraction.6 In
their parallels to emerging modes of abstract painting, the two series likewise add
to existing analyses of bodily experience and abstraction in the 1940s.
Trace and Trajectory: Camera Movements, ca. 194346
Around 1943 Callahan began to produce Camera Movements, a series of night-time
exposures of neon marquees and other urban light sources.7 He loaded a recently
acquired 35 mm Contax camera with colour transparency film (new to the con-
sumer market as of the late 1930s), took aim at these subjects, and then moved the
camera in varying patterns during extended exposure times.8 Callahans technique
and working conditions give many of these works a common syntax of linear traces
set within a black or near-black field. Yet, within these parameters, the series varies
widely in character. Some works are marked by delicate white tracery, while others
clearly revel in blurring together the jarring colours of commercial signs. A smaller
subset dispenses with the black background entirely, instead presenting a field of
colour that fills the frame.
This diversity has led to an emphasis on the accidental character of the
individual images, as in Sarah Greenoughs description of the series: these forms
never existed in any single instant in time; they were solely the result of his
movement and the cameras extended vision. Moreover, these images were wholly
161
 Brendan Fay

dependent on chance and intuition, for Callahan did not know beforehand what 8 On Callahans acquisition of the Contax
kind of form his gestures would take.9 A number of Camera Movement images, camera, see Pultz, Harry Callahan and
American Photography, 85. On the origins
however, offer indications that a more considered relationship between gesture and of the series, see Keith Davis, A Life in
form may have been at work in the production of the series. More than accident, Photography, Harry Callahan: Photographs,
these works suggest an underlying process of coordination or adaptation the Kansas City: Hallmark 1981, 55.
calibration of Callahans motions to the cameras field of view and to the antici- 9 Greenough, Harry Callahan, 41.
pated bounds of the resulting image. This quality of the series, once seen clearly,
helps situate these pictures between precedents in European photography and
parallels in US painting.
Consider Camera Movement on Neon Lights at Night, Chicago, where traces
of light are arranged in concentric arcs of varying intensity (figure 1). Two
adjacent white lights begin the exposure at the centre of the frame and wrap in
a clockwise arc toward its lower edge; two orange traces echo their shape, while
a host of other traces wrap upward from the left. Every bend or kink in the
brighter traces recurs in the fainter ones, their movements synchronised because
they derive from a single gesture. Details like these are the essential starting
point for dealing with camera motions of any kind, since they indicate points
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within the frame that correspond to a single point in time. In this case, the
concentric traces capture an inversion of the frame: the lens has remained
approximately centred on the scene while the camera has been rotated 180
around the axis of the lens. Although a simple task, this requires the action of
elbows as well as hands. The actual motion is not a pure point rotation but a
compound movement around a shifting pivot point, with the coordination of
muscles and the jostling of the camera all registering in the skittering quality of
the resulting traces. The effective centre of rotation turns out to be a point
below and to the left of the centre of the frame, which generates the very
different shapes of the upper and lower arcs.10 Neither the varied curvatures 10 Callahans comments about the series
nor the local detours are artefacts of pure chance: they are variations that occur have never clarified whether he was watching
through the viewfinder when making any of
within Callahans apparent choice of initial constraints, his pairing of frame the Camera Movements, but the offset posi-
with gesture.11 tion of the rangefinder on his Contax could
A similar sense of restriction is evident in works that look quite different. plausibly explain this compound rotation.
In a denser, more colour-saturated Camera Movement, for example, Callahan 11 He produced multiple additional but
radically different photographs of the same
isolates a red neon sign and exposes it in an oscillating pattern (figure 2). The
subject; see Harry Callahan Discussion Session
sign traverses the height of the frame at least twice during the exposure, all Selecting CCP Color Exhibit (1 of 8) (14
the while shifting from side to side. (The sign reads James M Shea Inc, and September 1978), videotaped recording of
the initial J and final C are legible in the protruding curves.) The oscillations conversation between Harry Callahan, Sally
Stein, Harold Jones, Terrence Pitts and
as Callahan shifts the camera left and right are not perfectly even, with some
William Johnson, Oral History Collection,
motions producing broad curves toward the edge of the frame, and others Center for Creative Photography, University of
narrow projections, but their consistent relationship to the vertical axis of the Arizona. For published variants, see Stein,
frame overrides the individual variations. The resulting form is complex, but Harry Callahan, 17; and Harry Callahan, ed.
Tow and Winsor, n.p.
also centred and contained: the leftward and rightward displacements are
limited in their extension, and leave irregular margins along the right and
left edges. The overall impression, again, is one of variation that takes place
within calculation or constraint. As Greenough notes, the time-lapse forms in
both of Callahans photographs derive from his gestures alone yet those
gestures seem, in turn, to be grounded in advance considerations about
framing. To revisit Greenoughs terms, its haphazard appearance derives as
much from intuition, honed over successive exposures, as from chance.
Callahans gestures, we might say, frequently seem to anticipate the relation-
ship between trace and framing edge in the completed photograph.
These aspects of the series help to distinguish Callahans work from a
number of remarkably similar pictures that Moholy-Nagy produced during 12 On Moholy-Nagys colour
his years in the USA, which were extensions of his general embrace of colour production, see Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Color
materials from the late 1930s.12 Compare, to begin, the roughly analogous in Transparency: Photographic Experiments
in Color, 19341946, ed. Jeannine Fiedler
structures of Callahans movement on red neon and Moholy-Nagys Night- and Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Gottingen:
time Traffic (Pink and Red Traffic Stream with White Sparks), Chicago Steidl 2006.

162
 How to Hold a Camera
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Figure 1. Harry Callahan, Camera Movement on Neon Lights, Chicago, dye transfer print from 35 mm colour transparency, 1946. The Estate of Harry
Callahan; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery. Collection of The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

Figure 2. Harry Callahan, untitled, 35 mm colour transparency, ca. 194346. The Estate of Harry Callahan; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery. Collection of
The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

163
 Brendan Fay

(figure 3). In both images, an interwoven collection of traces comes together

to form a stream of colour, bounded by solid black, that stretches across the
frame. Yet the differences between them are essential. While Moholy-Nagys
picture probably registers some incidental camera vibration, its flowing band
of colour primarily derives from motion within the subject itself. It was
probably produced during an evening, as Sybil Moholy-Nagy would later
recount, that Moholy-Nagy spent in downtown Chicago, standing in the
middle of traffic there for half the night with an open camera, photographing
with an open camera the light of the traffic lights and the automobile lights.13 13 Ibid., 154.
As a result, there are few synchronous forms discernible among its various
traces. The diagonal orientation of Moholy-Nagys band of colour even rein-
troduces a slight sense of depth, partly counteracting the flatness of the stark
black surroundings. Callahans image, by contrast, is both relentlessly planar
and fully rooted in bodily gesture.
No evidence indicates whether Callahan encountered Moholy-Nagys colour
slides prior to the production of his own series (or, conversely, which of Moholy-
Nagys works truly antedate Callahans), but in the end it hardly matters.14 On the 14 As noted in Stein, Harry Callahan, 89,
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one hand, as John Pultz has demonstrated, Callahans enthusiasm for light and Moholy-Nagys Vision in Motion includes
colour camera movements by Moholy-Nagy
motion and his inclination toward learning through experiment the precondi-
(from 1945) and Gyorgy Kepes (from 1943),
tions that made an idea such as Camera Movements possible were deeply rooted but neither pre-dates Callahans earliest
in Moholy-Nagys precedent and influence.15 On the other, the crucial difference experiments; see Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,
between the two bodies of work concerns not priority but breadth of investigation. Vision in Motion, Chicago: Paul Theobald
1947, 173. Moholy-Nagys colour works are
Sally Stein once summarised this difference by asserting that Moholy-Nagys difficult to date precisely; on their compli-
images simply lack the focused charge of Callahans.16 With the increased avail- cated provenance and slow re-accumulation
ability of work by both photographers, however, we can better define the divergent (many acquired only as reproductions of
problems they pursued. The basic oppositions can be outlined as follows: Moholy- reproductions), see Hattula Moholy-Nagy,
The Rediscovery of Moholy-Nagys Color
Nagys pictures frequently incorporate movement found within the scenes they Photography, in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, ed.
record, while Callahans never do. Callahans manipulations of the camera fre- Fiedler and Moholy-Nagy, 710. Sybil
quently seem calculated, while Moholy-Nagys rarely do. Moholy-Nagy, whose personal and teaching
If Moholy-Nagys images are marked by their openness to a wider range of collections constitute the primary source of
these works, may have projected one of
phenomena, in other words, they are also marked by their relative lack of proce-
Callahans Camera Movements during a slide
dural or gestural constraints. The former point is evident in Moholy-Nagys traffic lecture on light and motion at the 1951
images and his photographs of lights held by moving bodies, like the illustration meeting of the College Art Association; see
captioned Path of motion during a dance in Vision in Motion or the recently Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Retreat from the
Model, College Art Journal, 10:4 (Summer
published Three People Walking with Flashlights (ca. 193946).17 (Moholy-Nagys 1951), 376.
range of subjects is best situated within his broad embrace of electrified modernity 15 See Pultz, Harry Callahan and
and recording technologies.) The latter point, however the difference in the American Photography, 217.
movement of the camera itself is best seen in those cases where Moholy-Nagys 16 Stein, Harry Callahan, 9.
approach most closely resembles Callahans. 17 See Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 173;
and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, ed. Fiedler and
Compare, in this regard, Moholy-Nagys Three Shots of Traffic Lights and a Moholy-Nagy, 13435. This hybrid
previously unpublished image by Callahan (figures 4, 5). Both photographs present interaction of camera motion and real-world
tangled networks of line on dark backgrounds. They differ in density, but the motion is typical of Moholy-Nagys
subjects in each case are point sources of luminosity, rather than the neon signage night-time colour experiments but quite
foreign to Callahans.
found in other photographs by both artists. In each image a thicker, brighter set of
traces stands forth in the central portion of the frame. Both works, moreover, are
marked by a contrast between repetition and singularity, but it is in the details of
this contrast that the crucial differences emerge. Begin with the brightest element
in Moholy-Nagys image: a small white cluster found within the flow of a thick
trace, near the centre of the top edge. Dimmer but otherwise identical clusters,
which stand in identical relationship to the series of curves leading to and from
them, echo its form in at least four instances, descending to the left. We therefore
know that this corner of the image traces five different light sources simulta-
neously, within a single movement. No other repeated forms, however, are to be
found anywhere within the longer, smoother curves of the right half or bottom
edge of the image. In these portions of the frame, it is impossible to establish a
spatial or temporal relationship between a point on one trace and a point on any

164
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Figure 3. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Night-time Traffic (Pink and Red Traffic Stream with White Sparks), Chicago, 35 mm colour transparency, 193746. Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Figure 4. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Three Shots of Traffic Lights, 35 mm colour transparency, 193946. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 2015 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

165
 Brendan Fay
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Figure 5. Harry Callahan, untitled, 35 mm colour transparency, ca. 194346. The Estate of Harry Callahan; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery. Collection of
The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

other. Each of these wandering traces necessarily derives from an independent

movement of the camera past a particular light source, seen in isolation, during a
discrete segment of the total exposure. The repeated forms are outliers; the net-
work as a whole registers the accumulation of successive camera motions over
time.
In Callahans picture, these terms are reversed. Where Moholy-Nagys image is
criss-crossed by discrete traces, Callahans image is fundamentally defined by the
multiplication of a single gesture. A thick white foreground trace shoots upward
from near the centre of the frame past its top edge, then returns to trace a broad,
slanting U-shaped form that just skirts the bottom edge of the frame before exiting
again at the top. This slanting loop recurs throughout the image: we see it again
and again, in fifteen to twenty additional iterations of the same gesture that span
the width of the frame. These fainter, finer traces simultaneously echo and obscure
one another, creating a dense tangle of lines, but they all arise, simultaneously,
from a single motion that records multiple light sources. It is against this synchro-
nised patterning that three additional pairs of lateral traces run between the left
edge and the upper right corner. They extend Callahans core gesture into some-
thing closer in spirit to Moholy-Nagys free-form tracery. But even here each line
has its double, underscoring the relatively constrained character of this supple-
mentary motion: a couple of quick side-to-side shifts, probably dragging a pair of
lights back and forth across the cameras approximate field of view.
This photograph is more unruly than Callahans two examples above, as are a
number of the other Camera Movements, but it still hints at the effects of awareness
and accumulated experience. The forms within it initiate a dialogue with its frame,

166

18 On one recent pairing of the two artists
at Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York, see
Roberta Smith, Harry Callahan and
Jackson Pollock: Early Photographs and
Drawings, The New York Times (11 April
Downloaded by [Technical University of Crete] at 05:58 17 May 2016
2011), C31.
19 For an account of this issue as treated
by Clement Greenberg and William
Rubin, see Francois-Marc Gagnon, The
Work and its Grip, in Jackson Pollock:
Questions, Montreal: Musee dart
contemporain 1979, 3538.
20 On Pollocks place within the broad
context of Modern Man discourse, see
Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract
Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in
the 1940s, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press 1993. On the anti-authorial aspects of
Pollocks engagement with gravity and
horizontality, see Krauss, The Optical
Unconscious, 243308.
21 The work [at General Motors] may
have affected my own pictures they did a
lot of copy work and I think thats why I
photographed the torn signs that and the
abstract paintings Id seen in New York.
Davis, A Life in Photography, 54. On the
encounter with Stuart Daviss abstractions,
see Davis, A Life in Photography, 53; and
Diana L. Johnston, A Conversation with
Harry Callahan, in Callahan in New
England, Providence, RI: List Art Center,
Brown University 1994.
22 Callahan related his early interest in
nocturnal subjects to his working
conditions: I went to a factory in Detroit
grinding tool bits [. . .]. I was working about
80 hours a week and it was real hard to do
my photography. Id try to shoot the moon
I was so hard up for subjects. See Davis, A
Life in Photography, 53.
How to Hold a Camera
or seem to respond to the frames pressure, in a way that rarely occurs in Moholy-
Nagys works. (Even in Callahans wildest, most all-over experiments, the impres-
sion is of an attempt to achieve maximum complexity without letting the initial
subject slip fully out of view.) The contrast with Moholy-Nagys pictures under-
scores the two principles at work throughout Callahans Camera Movements: the
forms they contain are generated through camera motion alone, yet those motions
are constrained by the camera in turn. It is the combined effect of these two
principles or restrictions that constitutes the focused charge Stein identifies.
Put differently, this charge derives from a tension between forms that record
bodily movement and the pressure applied by their surrounding frame. In this
respect, and in thinking about where these photographs might fit in histories of
abstraction, the narrow focus of Callahans Camera Movements invites qualified
comparison with formal concerns that would soon emerge in Jackson Pollocks
drip paintings.18 As Francois-Marc Gagnon once chronicled, the qualified all-over
patterning of Pollocks drip paintings their clear awareness of the limits of the
canvas was a point of substantial discussion at several stages in Pollocks
reception.19 As Callahans red neon Camera Movement shows, a comparable
dynamic was present throughout his series, even when strictly linear traces were
not. Still, the qualifications are substantial ones: the scale of bodily involvement is
utterly different, and there are no equivalents in Pollock for Callahans synchro-
nised forms nor in Callahan for Pollocks relationship to gravity, his commit-
ment to the unconscious as a source of meaning, or his struggles against Picasso
and Cubism.20 Against Pollocks avant-gardism, Callahan was still proceeding out
of amateur status into an awareness of modern art. (Tellingly, he would later
describe one stage of his interest in abstraction by referring both to an encounter
with the work of Stuart Davis, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945, and to the
copy photography he had been doing as a photo-lab employee at General
Motors.21 If Callahan perceived an anti-authorial or self-effacing dimension to
abstraction, the recognition may have been rooted in his work experiences outside
the visual arts.22) Reading Callahans Camera Movements with an eye for body
camera interactions, they indicate one way in which formal concerns loosely
aligned with Pollocks could have emerged from starting points so proximate to
Moholy-Nagys one way in which a well-placed amateur could have arrived at
formal problems that were elsewhere seen as central concerns of modernism.
Within broader conversations about abstraction and photography, they suggest
that bodily relationships to ones tools could serve photographers of this period,
like their counterparts in painting, as points of departure for the production of
abstract works. Within this particular moment in Callahans career, they also hint
at an acute attention to the basic facts of a camera held in his hands and the
generative role this might play in his work.
Depth against Perspective: Telephone Wires, 1945 and after
A second series from these years, Callahans Telephone Wires, foregrounds a
different kind of bodycamera interaction: it asks us to consider the shifting
position of a ground-glass image within Callahans field of view. The Telephone
Wires transform views of overhead wiring into spare, graphic configurations of
black lines against white grounds. The graphic appearance of these photographs
partly depends on high-contrast printing, but their formal complexity derives from
Callahans choices about framing and consequently from his pursuit of unusual
viewpoints and viewing angles. They arrive at an abstraction concerned with
perceptual ambiguity, rather than the gestural tracery of Camera Movements.
The majority of Telephone Wires, a set of about eighty square-format expo-
sures on 2 inch roll film, were shot on Callahans Rolleicord, a twin-lens reflex
camera he had owned since 1938. He also produced four 8 inch x 10 inch view-
camera negatives on this theme, noted below, but the Rolleicord pictures provide
167
 Brendan Fay

more systematic evidence of his approach. With a focusing screen atop the camera
body, at a right angle to the lens (and with the image there reversed laterally but
not vertically), cameras of this type sought a compromise between the ground-
glass viewing experience of larger cameras and the mobility of smaller ones. The in-
between quality of this camera helps to place the technical and physical aspects of
Callahans approach in context, but it probably informed the making of the series
as well. Retracing Callahans compositional process, the Telephone Wires often
seem to arise out of a combination of disorientation and alignment: they suggest
an underlying experience of seeing a composition come into shape while feeling
the camera slip out of place. By this reading, the Telephone Wires merit considera-
tion within a historical moment when other abstract artists engaged questions
about their conditions of perception. They open relays between Callahans techni-
cal concerns, which were rooted in the influence of Ansel Adams, and the emerging
pictorial concerns of a painter like Barnett Newman.
I begin with two closely related images, which illuminate Callahans com-
positional process while illustrating some of his recurring formal strategies
(figures 6, 7). Both show a group of six wires crossed by an isolated seventh
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wire: they were originally consecutive exposures, and probably show the same
subject from different viewpoints. Seen in isolation, it is easy to imagine that
the initial flatness of each composition simply follows from the flatness of the
subject that the depicted wires all lie in a single plane, directly overhead. Seen
in comparison, however, the two pictures indicate a more complicated set of
spatial relationships. Notice that the six aligned wires are actually arranged in
two sets of three. In figure 6 they trace adjacent paths; in figure 7 one set is
seen through the other, and the angle at which they converge also changes. For
these parallax effects to be possible, the three-wire sets must be separated in
space (the six wires cannot all be coplanar), but Callahan must have changed
positions as well. In both pictures, moreover, the intervals between wires
narrow slightly as they run from right to left. This suggests that the wires
move further from the camera as they approach the left edge of the frame and
implies, in turn, that Callahans subject is not just above but also in front of his
viewing position. Notice, finally, that Callahans pursuit of these differences
requires a rotation of the film in addition to a change in viewing position. At
most, one of the two pictures (although not necessarily either) could have been
taken with the lower edge of the film still parallel to the ground.
The Telephone Wires often look like we are staring straight at the sky; this is
almost never the case. One side effect of the Rolleicords design is particularly
relevant in this respect: since its focusing screen is viewed from a distance, rather
than with the camera in close contact with the eye, the camera could potentially be
held anywhere within ones field of view without sacrificing compositional preci-
sion. (Rotating the frame away from the horizontal, for example, would typically
require swinging the camera away from ones torso.) This mobility around the
users body, if not the leading feature in the marketing of these cameras, was a
common point of instruction in guidebooks and other descriptive accounts.23 It 23 See Walter Heering, The Rollei Book: A
was also an important factor in Callahans making of the series, and might be said Textbook for the Use of the Rolleixflex and
Rolleicord, 6th ed., Vaduz: Dr. Heering
to figure in the cultivated ambiguity of many of the pictures. The first photograph
1954, 3036; and Jacob Deschin, Rollei
above typifies Callahans pursuit of ambiguities involving spatial position. As its Photography: Handbook of the Rolleiflex and
taut diagonal composition yields to a sense of depth, there are multiple ways to Rolleicord Cameras, San Francisco: Camera
imagine the relationship between the wires crossing our field of view. Does the Craft 1952, 55.
single wire run above, below or through the other six, for example? The three
options are equally plausible but mutually exclusive, and each choice subtly shifts
the apparent angles of the various wires relative to our line of sight. The second
photograph typifies Callahans pursuit of ambiguities involving apparent grouping.
He overlaps the sets of three wires so that they appear to form a set of four at the
left edge, and then underscores the asymmetry of this near-horizontal band by
contrasting it to the symmetry of the marked vertical axis.

168
 How to Hold a Camera

Figure 6. Harry Callahan, Telephone Wires,

gelatin silver print, ca. 194555. The
Estate of Harry Callahan; courtesy Pace/
MacGill Gallery. Collection of The Center
for Creative Photography, University of
Arizona.
Downloaded by [Technical University of Crete] at 05:58 17 May 2016

Figure 7. Harry Callahan, Telephone Wires,

detail of gelatin silver contact sheet,
ca. 194555. The Estate of Harry
Callahan; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery.
Collection of The Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona.

169
 Brendan Fay

Many of the Telephone Wires combine these forms of ambiguity, using them to
produce a strategic confusion of convergence and divergence that lies at the heart
of the series. Consider three more consecutive exposures, two of which again frame
a single subject in different ways.24 In the middle of the three frames, two outer 24 AG29 selected negatives/contact sheets,
pairs of wires delineate a central trapezoid while a third pair cuts through its HCA/CCP. Consecutive frame numbers and
other edge markings establish the original
interior (figure 9, top). It is apparent that the centre and leftmost pairs of wires continuity of these two strips of negatives,
belong together in actual space, receding in depth as they converge in the frame. found with sheets R242 and R244. Proof
Yet the precise intersection of the centre and rightmost wires, at the upper edge of prints of Telephone Wires derive from
the image, introduces a triangular area that again hovers between planar shape and R-series negatives on 2 inch film stock:
each R-number corresponds to both a sheet
recession. Between the downward emphasis of the (actually) receding wires and the
of negatives (typically holding three
upward thrust of the (camera-based) triangular shape, each with a claim to the continuous strips of four frames each) and
central wire, the basic symmetry of the composition is subjected to a kind of also to an 8 inch x 10 inch contact print
torsion. made from that sheet. There are no official
descriptors for strips of film or individual
The first frame of the set, by contrast, is a markedly asymmetrical rendering frames. AG29 (boxes unnumbered) selected
of the same wires from a different viewpoint (figure 8). A slightly different negatives, R126 to R562, HCA/CCP; and
contest between apparent groupings ensues. As we shift our attention between AG29 contact sheets from selected
pairs between the receding downward pair and the implicit upward triangle negatives, R1 to R484, HCA/CCP. For a
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description of the multiple organisational

the remaining wire in each case seems to pivot in depth: toward us, hinged at the systems encountered among Callahans
top, or away from us, hinged at the bottom. In the final frame from this strip of materials, see Amy Rule, The Archive of
sequential exposures, Callahan courts similar effects from a different subject Harry Callahan, in Britt Salvesen, Harry
(figure 9, bottom). Three pairs of double wires fan out from the lower right; Callahan: The Photographer at Work, New
Haven, CT, and Tucson, AZ: Yale
the leftmost pair terminates at the upper left corner of the picture, while running
University Press and Center for Creative
parallel to an additional single wire that is exceedingly difficult to locate in space. Photography 2006, 187.
As in many other images from the series, skew planes continually seem to fold
into one another as we prioritise various planar relationships parallel or
converging in our reconstruction of spatial relationships.
In these pictures, Callahan stages a confrontation between the convergence of
wires in space, in perspective, and in the plane of the image, setting those facts at
odds with one another. This strategy pinpoints the specificity of the Telephone
Wires relative to their clearest precedents: the oblique views popularised by
Moholy-Nagy and others, and the Equivalents of Alfred Stieglitz. Callahans inter-
ests in upward views and geometric patterning were hardly novel by 1945, but his
chosen subject and technique enabled some key departures. In describing Moholy-
Nagys embrace of radical viewpoints, for example, Beaumont Newhall emphasised
the perspective rendering of parallel lines in elevation, or converging verticals, as
an essential part of his approach.25 In Callahans pictures there are no vertical 25 See Beaumont Newhall, The
elements in play; the subject instead lies within a datum plane or cross-section of Photography of Moholy-Nagy, Kenyon
Review, 3:3 (Summer 1941), 347: By
space that passes overhead, although it remains difficult to fix its relationship to tipping the camera down [. . .] converging
ground or sky. This also distinguishes Callahans pictures from Stieglitzs verticals play against the unfamiliar birdseye
Equivalents, where the sky itself serves as planar image. Through their heightened views of common objects to create exciting
contrast, the Telephone Wires instead explore the strange way in which a blank sky patterns and forms. [. . .] Looking upwards
with the camera, the verticals again
functions as an unstable ground, shifting with our apparent angle of view as we
converge, this time reversely.
parse Callahans linear configurations.26 Like the Equivalents, however, the abstrac- 26 This is a different effect from the
tion of the Telephone Wires departs from our awareness of what we see and the ungrounded quality often noted in the
corollary sense that a clear orientation should be available to us in order to make Equivalents: see Rosalind Krauss, Stieglitz/
Equivalents, October, 11 (Winter 1979),
that seeing into something strange.
13435; Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitzs
Callahans square-format Telephone Wires can be examined in sequence, as Photographs of Clouds, PhD thesis,
above, because of a concentrated approach to the series that his negatives make University of New Mexico 1984, 15669
visible. All of Callahans 2 inch negatives for the series are grouped together: they and 190; Kristina Wilson, The Intimate
Gallery and the Equivalents: Spirituality
are found on continuous strips of film, now cut into sets of three or four
in the 1920s Work of Stieglitz, Art Bulletin,
exposures, and they are never interrupted by exposures of other subjects. It is 85:4 (December 2003), 74647 and 757; and
therefore quite likely that Callahan pursued the series on rolls of film dedicated Judy Annear, Clouds to Rain Stieglitz and
solely to that task. Since Callahan was pursuing a high-contrast subject, and may the Equivalents, American Art, 25:1 (Spring
2011), 1619. Wilson and Annear both
have wanted to adjust his film processing accordingly, it would have made sense
emphasise the scale and resulting intimacy
for him to restrict his attention for the length of a given twelve-exposure roll; in a of Stieglitzs small prints.
few cases, it is possible to reconstruct full rolls of twelve exposures and confirm this

170
 How to Hold a Camera

Figure 8. Harry Callahan, Telephone Wires,

detail of gelatin silver contact sheet,
ca. 194555. The Estate of Harry
Callahan; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery.
Collection of The Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona.
Downloaded by [Technical University of Crete] at 05:58 17 May 2016

Figure 9. Harry Callahan, Telephone Wires,

detail of gelatin silver contact sheet,
ca. 194555. The Estate of Harry Callahan;
courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery. Collection of
The Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona.

171
 Brendan Fay

directly. These are not occasional glances upward while travelling through the city
on other agendas, in other words: they are images deliberately sought, and cap-
tured in relatively compact moments of focused attention. We know that Callahan
turned to this motif by 1945, and probably produced about three-quarters of his
square-format exposures sometime before 1955 (a smaller, second wave of nega-
tives, noted at the end of this article, appears to begin in the mid-1960s).27 The 27 The most securely dated photograph
photographer on foot in urban space, chasing a specific pictorial concept such an on this theme is the 8 inch x 10 inch
exposure Detroit, 1945 (see figure 10).
approach would be perfectly in line with everything we know about Callahans
Callahans square-format negatives for
working methods, including the frequent basis of his projects in underlying Telephone Wires are found on two different
technical concerns.28 types of 2 inch Kodak film stock, which
The Telephone Wires were not the first photographs in which Callahan reduced can be assigned to two separate periods of
use on the basis of other, securely dated
an already linear subject to pure black and white, but their spatial complexity pictures taken on each type. The earlier film
separates them from his other early experiments in graphic rendering. Indeed, his stock reads Kodak Safety Film in plain text
graphic approach originally emerged out of his work with a larger view camera and along its edge. Sixty-three of the eighty-five
by way of his prior devotion to the model of Ansel Adams. The breakthrough square-format Telephone Wires in the
Callahan archive, including all of the
picture, Callahans 1943 Weeds in Snow, marked his first departure from Adamss
examples reproduced with this text, are
core principle of full continuous tonal distribution. As Britt Salvesen has shown, found on this earlier film stock. Negatives
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however, Callahan originally described this image, in terms still indebted to of other subjects on the same film indicate
Adams, as a final print visualised at the moment of exposure: on the ground an approximate date range of 194555 for
these earlier exposures. The second, later
glass I suddenly just saw lines of the weeds in the snow.29 Callahan would film stock encloses the word Kodak within
modulate his telling of this origin narrative over the rest of his career, but he a left-facing block arrow, and appears to
had firmly established this picture as a turning point, and its graphic quality as a have been in use from the mid-1960s
viable mode, by the time he turned to Telephone Wires around 1945. The Telephone through the mid-1970s. Twenty-two addi-
tional exposures of Telephone Wires are
Wires bear little resemblance to Adamss work, but they were composed in relation found on this later film.
to the full area of the negative, and exposed in relation to advance decisions about 28 His close-cropped images of the faces
processing, printing, and final appearance. The oddity of the series, in other words, of female pedestrians (ca. 1950), made
is that it extends Callahans twist on Adamss practice of previsualisation while possible through a preliminary decision to
gain film speed by overdevelopment, are the
adding a set of spatial or physical concerns.30 As several period sources suggest, his
most famous example; see Salvesen, Harry
camera could be understood in analogous terms. Callahan, 3031.
Rolleiflex for Action Shots! So declares, beneath a photograph of a leaping 29 Ibid., 2527. Salvesen documents
woman, a 1939 advertisement in Life magazine for Rolleis line of TLR cameras. Callahans shifting deployment of this
memory across his career.
While the advert boasts the acclaim of top-notch professionals, its greater concern
30 On the concept of previsualisation in
is to welcome Life readers to the family of Rollei users. After all, one does not have the work of Edward Weston and, subse-
to be an expert to get beautifully composed, critically sharp pictures with this quently, Adams, see Newhall, History of
amazing camera. It shows you each picture before you make it.31 If these exhorta- Photography, 12331. Statements of the
tions add up to an unlikely promise to show you action shots before you make principle include Edward Weston, Random
Notes on Photography (1922), in
them they nevertheless capture the Rolleis positioning within the booming mid- Photography: Essays and Images, ed.
century camera market: it offered mobility and the use of roll film without the Beaumont Newhall, New York: Museum of
approximations and uncertainties of a miniature cameras viewfinder. One instruc- Modern Art 1980, 225; Ansel Adams, A
tional book from the 1950s thus credited the Rollei line with the origins of what Personal Credo (1943), in Photography, ed.
Newhall, 26061; and Edward Weston,
to-day is one of the surest picture taking methods [. . .]. We watch what we are Foreword, in Ansel Adams, Making a
taking, while taking it, just as the camera sees it.32 Competing TLR designs were Photograph: An Introduction to Photography,
marketed with a similar logic in the following decades, even when they appeared London and New York: Studio 1935, 11.
alongside a companys main line of miniature cameras.33 31 Advertisement in Life, 6:10 (6 March
1939), 76; emphasis added.
Newhall had offered similar characterisations, if from a different vantage 32 L. A. Mannheim, The Rollei Way: The
point, in his landmark 1937 catalogue. While placing clear distinctions between Rolleiflex and Rolleicord Photographers
the view camera and the miniature camera at the foundation of contemporary Companion, London: Focal Press [ca.
photographic aesthetics, Newhall still concurred with advertisers and enthusiasts 1952], 12.
33 Kodak, for example, advertised its
that TLR designs offered compromises between the stand camera and the minia-
Duaflex cameras with the tag line You see
ture. Noting a model of great popularity on the Continent, he explained: The the picture youre taking in advance; then
picture can be composed on the ground glass as in a view camera, yet the camera is push the button. Advertisement in Life,
small enough to be handled easily, its film is cheap, and it is relatively inconspic- 44:4 (7 April 1958), 3435.
uous. It could capture subjects that might have passed before larger cameras
could have been gotten out, and yet we should have been disappointed with the
34 Beaumont Newhall, Photography
less detailed pictures which a smaller camera would have yielded.34 What Newhall 18391937, New York: Museum of Modern
meant as modest praise for situational convenience, the later instructional book Art 1937, 76.

172

35 Mannheim, Rollei Way, 10.
36 Ibid., 20.
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Figure 10. Harry Callahan, Detroit, gelatin
silver print, 1945. The Estate of Harry
Callahan; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery.
Collection of The Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona.
How to Hold a Camera
would enthusiastically describe as a happy mean between miniature and large
cameras.35 More notably, it would describe the Rollei viewfinder as sort of like a
television screen which we watch until something interesting comes along where
we would like to shout stop!36
The square-format Telephone Wires invite examination in these terms in
relation to a screen watched while in motion around the body, its changing image
deriving from the shifting position of the screen itself and doing so opens their
stark geometry to issues of bodily positioning and perception. Callahan also
produced at least four additional Telephone Wires with his 8 inch x 10 inch view
camera, however. No external data establish the chronological priority of either
subset, but the view-camera pictures offer a more distilled or concentrated treat-
ment of the subject; the physical shifts we register when comparing the Rolleicord
pictures seem, in the view-camera works, to be compressed within a single image.
The effect usually derives from their narrower focus on the visually flattened
intervals between parallel wires. In Detroit, the first published example of the
series, three wires span the height of the vertically-oriented frame while three
additional wires just graze the lower left corner (figure 10). As the longer wires
run toward the lower edge, they read like a vertical band receding in depth (each
wire stacked above the previous one), while at the top of the frame, as the intervals
173
 Brendan Fay

between them become wider and increasingly regular, they seem to flatten out and
to turn to face us. Yet the wires in the lower corner, arranged in a lateral band
running parallel to our body, do the same. The image enacts a kind of short circuit,
asking us to square ourselves to two different points we know to be dislocated from
one another.
In their play of line against an unstable ground, Telephone Wires invite
comparison to formal concerns that would emerge in Barnett Newmans painting
about three years later, in the wake of his breakthrough painting Onement I (1948).
Yve-Alain Bois once characterised Newmans work from this point forward as a
sort of phenomenological inquiry into the nature of perception.37 In Boiss read- 37 Yve-Alain Bois, Perceiving Newman,
ing, Newmans paintings served to foster awareness of our bodily conditions of in Painting as Model, 195.
perception of precisely those qualities that separate human seeing from camera
vision. Newmans key realisation, as Bois defines it, was that our perceptual space
is originarily governed by nonisotropy in one direction and by [bilateral] symme-
try in the other [. . .] due to the fact that it is our body that perceives and not some
mechanical and objective device.38 Starting out from that premise, Newman sought 38 Ibid., 197; emphasis added. [S]ymmetry
to return viewers to it: his famous zips, particularly as deployed within the lateral as an essential condition of our perception,
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Bois adds, [. . .] implies the nonreversibility

expansion and increasing asymmetry of his canvases, served to undercut figure/ of a top and a bottom as much as our being
ground oppositions in ways that left viewers certain of nothing but a few basic facts situated in or engaged with the world implies
upright posture, expanse, scale. What happens, however, when a mechanical and our erect human posture. Ibid., 196.
objective device repeatedly intervenes in that vis-a`-vis relationship between
upright viewer and world? Seen alongside and against Newmans project,
Callahans Telephone Wires ask us to consider this alternate premise. The philoso-
phical stakes differ, certainly: Newmans concern for subject matter was rooted in
an epochal sense that painting needed to recreate itself from zero; Callahans search
for photographic subjects in the surrounding world was, at this stage of his career,
partly an experiment in structuring his time and activity outside the world of
traditional work. Still, the abstraction of both paintings and photographs is
grounded in a common principle or formal strategy that of competing figures
which prevent a fixed reading of the underlying ground and thereby direct our
attention back to conditions of seeing. The Telephone Wires are noteworthy for the
way they thematise a slightly amended notion of perceptual space one that 39 This is to note correlation rather than
includes the behaviour of a planar image, however mechanically or objectively cause, and relative habituation rather than
determination. Around 1950, for example,
generated on the cameras glass, as a component of a photographers bodily
Callahan deliberately employed his view
experience. This was a commonplace experience, certainly (for habitual TLR camera to create a series of what he referred
photographers it would become second nature, if not quite a phenomenological to as 8 x 10 snapshots of his wife and
given of the type interrogated by Newman), but Callahans specific pairing of daughter; on this series, see Salvesen, Harry
Callahan, 34. Similarly, Callahan always
subject with technique claims it as the basis for an abstraction built around
described the colour Camera Movements as
perceptual ambiguities. It is an experience, moreover, that varies between cameras, originating in earlier black-and-white
each format interacting with our mechanisms of perception in a slightly different experiments, and produced a very small
way. Callahans Rolleicord and view camera, each operated at some distance from number of black-and-white movement-
based works with his 2 inch camera; see
the eye and exhibiting some form of image reversal, apparently lent themselves to
Davis, A Life in Photography, 55; and
the compositional process underlying the Telephone Wires. Looking back at his Greenough, Harry Callahan, 41. Nothing
Camera Movements, we see how they prioritise the directness with which his prevented Callahan from photographing
35 mm camera, imposing no such reversals, converted gesture to trace.39 telephone wires with a 35 mm camera, in
other words, but he does not appear to have
In 1975 Callahan recalled once hearing that [Edward] Steichen said people
done so during the 1940s.
ought to get their cameras off the tripod. He was speaking with John Szarkowski, 40 John Szarkowski, Callahan sides 1 + 2
in a conversation tape-recorded during preparations for Callahans 1976 retro- / April 75, audiocassette recording of
spective at the Museum of Modern Art. It wasnt because Steichen said it, interview with Harry Callahan, Department
Callahan explained, of Photography, Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Quotes from this recording are
but I do know that I finally decided that I wanted to look at a picture right based on a transcription by the author. My
thanks to Whitney Gaylord for locating and
side up, and I didnt want to stand there, and [. . .] I remember something I
sharing the extant tape, which preserves one
read Stieglitz said once, or maybe Todd [Webb] told me about Stieglitz, that hour of discussion, although Szarkowskis
he used to set up his 8x10 camera and hed just enjoy looking through the catalogue suggests that multiple tapes were
back of that camera for up to an hour or two hours [. . .]. I mean, I just I made. See John Szarkowski, Callahan,
dont want to do that, you know? I dont want to stand around like that.40 Millerton, NY: Aperture 1976, 26 note 3.

174

41 See Stein, Harry Callahan, 13; and
Salvesen, Harry Callahan, 45. For an
overview of this shift, see Kevin Moore,
Starburst: Color Photography in America
19701980, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz and
Cincinnati Art Museum 2010, 814. Colour
transparency film, a direct positive process,
was still reasonably new in the mid-1940s,
and someone of Callahans limited means
had few affordable and satisfactory options
for generating paper prints. Unlike Saul
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Leiter, whose early colour photography has
recently undergone a comparable process of
rediscovery, and who would project his
personal colour work at private gatherings,
Callahan never embraced slide projection as
a medium or end use of its own. See Martin
Harrison, Saul Leiter: Early Color
19481960, in Saul Leiter: Early Color,
Steidl: Gottingen 2006, n.p.; and Ulrich
Ruter, Undiscovered Seeing: Saul Leiters
Color Photographs, in Saul Leiter:
Retrospective, ed. Ingo Taubhorn and
Brigitte Woischnik, Kehrer: Heidelberg
2012, 27475. My thanks to an anonymous
reviewer for suggesting Leiter as a point of
comparison.
42 On the bulk printing of 35 mm
negatives in preparation for Szarkowskis
exhibition, see Rule, Archive of Harry
Callahan, 187. Callahan proof-printed a
massive cross-section of his negatives
more than ten thousand frames, now a
significant portion of the visual material
found in his archive so that the curator
could examine his lifes work afresh in
selecting the 1976 show. It is not clear
whether the 2 inch R-series proof prints
were made at Szarkowskis specific request,
but they appear to date from approximately
the same moment.
43 See Szarkowski, Callahan, 6769. The
first of the three Telephone Wires repro-
duced in his catalogue was taken on the
earlier film stock (ca. 194555), while the
other two are from the set of negatives
taken in the 1960s or 1970s. Similarly,
Salvesen, Harry Callahan, 6869, includes
two ca. 1960s70s exposures (plates 17a and
17b) alongside two ca. 194555 exposures
(plates 17c and 17d) under the blanket date
of ca. 1945.
44 Emmet Gowin to Harry Callahan, 22
December 1976, AG29:6 HCA
Correspondence, MoMA: correspondence
from various sources re: MoMA
retrospective, HCA/CCP.
45 Harry Callahan, Photographs: Harry
Callahan, Santa Barbara, CA: El Mochuelo
Gallery 1964.
How to Hold a Camera
Had he ever? The works examined here clearly invite us to think otherwise. Yet
Callahans remark to Szarkowski concerns his changing approach in the 1960s
rather than his beginnings in the 1940s. He more or less abandoned the view
camera early in that decade, roughly coinciding with his move from Chicago to
begin his influential tenure at the Rhode Island School of Design. Significantly,
many of his most important opportunities for self-editing and self-presentation
occurred only after these shifts in his surroundings and working methods.
Understood in context, Callahans comment highlights the need to read Camera
Movements and Telephone Wires within their original moment of emergence: a
moment when an aspiring amateur might still engage with, and draw inspiration
from, the differences among a wider array of camera formats. The camera as a
screen-based device sort of like a television screen has become commonplace
in the digital era, but in the intervening decades it was far less likely to constitute a
novices first experience of the medium. This narrow bounding is necessary, in
part, because later returns to each series have obscured their common ground.
Camera Movements gained prominence in the 1970s, at a moment when
Callahan was making a final shift toward colour film as his exclusive medium.
New economies of scale and Callahans greater fame and changing working
methods made printed enlargements of his early colour work a realistic under-
taking, and Camera Movements appeared as dye transfer prints.41 Beginning with
Sally Steins 1979 exhibition that placed recent pictures alongside new prints from
old slides, several volumes have since surveyed his lifetime of colour production.
With a thematic emphasis on colour, however, they ask us to read Camera
Movements as a preface to the work Callahan made during his late career, rather
than in relation to their moment of making.
After his move to Providence, Callahan also engaged in occasional returns to
Telephone Wires, shooting a small number of new frames on the same theme. The
newer frames are subtly but visibly different: the overhead wiring is frequently
thicker (and less taut, running in catenary arcs as often as straight lines), while
Callahans framing strategies allow for more haphazard connections between the
four edges of the picture. The existing proof prints of the series, older and newer
exposures alike, may date to the period when Szarkowski was preparing his
retrospective.42 Ultimately including three square-format Telephone Wires in the
1976 monograph one older, two newer he dated each individual image
c.19451976, emphasising Callahans intermittent returns to the subject over
his more substantial early engagement.43 The contact established between past
and present, however, was emblematic of Szarkowskis broader curatorial
approach.
In the years since the early 1960s in the wake of Callahans decision to finally
look at a picture right side up street photography and travel images had become
dominant aspects of his practice. Szarkowskis show certainly incorporated this
newer work, but it also offered a slightly different, slightly more archival Callahan
than the one in circulation at that moment. Emmet Gowin captured this aspect of
the retrospective in a letter to his old mentor, registering his surprise at the range
of work he had seen on view. The earliest pictures show (reveal) so much
discovery, so much flexibility, Gowin wrote. He added, parenthetically: Im
thinking now [of] the many arrangements of papers, etc., telephone wires, cut
up magazines pictures that werent in the 1964 book.44 Gowins point of
reference was Callahans first full-scale monograph, Photographs: Harry Callahan,
which was a key vehicle for his influence and his public image in the 1960s but also
a volume where the experimental work of the preceding two decades was in
limited evidence.45 Szarkowski shifted this balance slightly, countering recent
production with an assortment of archival finds. (It was a retrospective after all,
although the pattern of Szarkowskis selections hints at an interest in marking the
distance between Callahan and the younger street photographers he had cham-
pioned elsewhere.) Returning a number of Callahans early strategies into current
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 Brendan Fay

circulation, Szarkowski set the stage for a renewed discussion and new critique
of his Bauhaus inheritance.46 46 See The New Vision: Forty Years of
Returning Callahans Camera Movements and Telephone Wires to a narrower Photography at the Institute of Design, ed.
Charles Traub, Millerton, NY: Aperture
frame, this article has argued for the generative role of camera differences in his
1982, which served as a key point of
early career. It has suggested, further, that his attention to bodycamera interac- departure for Solomon-Godeau, Armed
tions offers one set of relays from his photographic influences and technical Vision Disarmed.
concerns to analogous problems in abstract painting of the 1940s. These arguments
suggest two ways we might position mid-twentieth century photography in rela-
tion to cyclical interpretations of the resurgence of abstract photography. On the
one hand, they suggest that work from this period might yet respond to Matthew
Witkovskys provocative emphasis on the the body of the photographer in his
pointed survey of recent works and their avant-garde precedents.47 On the other, 47 Witkovsky, Another History, 215.
in relation to accounts that privilege forms of abstraction wrought directly from
photographic materials, they indicate that we might approach cameras, and the
variability of bodycamera relationships, as a comparable testing ground in the
mid-century decades.
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