Exhibition
November 22 - December 20, 2019

Opening: Nov. 21 | 6-8 pm

Harry Callahan | Various Aspects

Harry Callahan (1912 – 1999) is regarded as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century however his works have rarely been shown in Europe.
From November 22, Kunsthandel Jörg Maaß will be presenting a collection of circa 25 works by the American. In addition to classic icons of black-and-white photography, rare color prints will be included.

The exhibition comprises important examples of the three central themes in the photographer's work: street scenes and façade views, landscape photographs, and nude studies of his wife Eleanor.

Harry Callahan was a self-taught photographer. Born in Detroit in 1912, he only began to work as a photographer in 1938. Soon photography became his vocation, and only eight years later he followed László Moholy-Nagy's invitation and taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago, heading the photography department there as of 1949. In 1961 he was appointed professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. With growing success and the sale of his first works, Callahan withdrew from his teaching position at the end of the 1970s and concentrated on color photography until the late 1980s, with which he had already experimented over the years.

Repeatedly, from his early to his late work, Callahan produced inspired photographs of his daily walks through the cities. They form the largest group of works in the exhibition. From 1941 to 1945 in Detroit, as of 1946 in Chicago, then in Providence, and finally on his travels through countries such as Mexico, Peru, Ireland, and Morocco. His work titles usually only refer to place and year; there are façade views with shop windows; street corners; intersections and house entrances, not always deserted, but simple and elegant, sometimes as abstract close-ups or complex double exposures, and often with an eye for moments typical of the time.

In addition, there will be a small selection of intimate landscapes on view, including the vast sandy beach of Cape Cod or the snow-covered shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, as well as examples of very private, carefully composed nude studies of his beloved wife Eleanor, in which Callahan's strict formal principles are most evident.

In the nearly 60 years of his career, Harry Callahan created an extraordinary photographic oeuvre, always focused on the everyday aspects of his life and with a strong interest in a wide variety of photographic techniques. He experimented with line and form, the play of light and shadow, double exposure to the point of abstraction. In the early days, still in warm-toned prints, he reduces the reproduction of the wide range of tonal values over time and creates high-contrast black-and-white prints. Small-format Ektacolor prints coincide with brightly colored dye-transfer prints. In spite of his many different aspects and approaches - both in form and content - Callahan's work remains self-contained and is of great importance for the history of American photography of the 20th century.