Harry Callahan “City”
Pace MacGill
This event has ended.
Featuring a selection of nearly 50 gelatin silver prints, the exhibition examines in depth one of the central themes of Harry Callahan’s oeuvre: the urban landscape. When viewed collectively, Callahan’s black-and-white city studies from the 1940s to 1970s masterfully demonstrate his ability to evolve a single genre over time by revisiting and expanding his conceptual discourse.
One of the foremost American photographers of the 20th century, Callahan (1912-1999) repeatedly returned throughout his six-decade career to the same subjects – his wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara, nature, and the city – but continually developed new methods to embrace and depict them. Utilizing different cameras and materials, the resulting pictures are thematically consistent, but varied in their aesthetic approach. As Callahan wrote in his artist statement for the 1964 monograph, Harry Callahan: Photographs, published by
El Mochuelo Gallery, Santa Barbara: It’s the subject matter that counts. I’m interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can’t always see. Wanting to see more makes you grow as a person and growing makes you want to show more of life around you. In each exploration or concern for the subject, I continue in the area for a great length of time, sometimes a couple of years. Working this way has been the result of my doing the photo series or groups. Many things I can’t return to and many things I return to come out better.
In their innovative approach to subject matter, Callahan’s close-up compositions of Chicago building facades, abstracted views of New York City skyscrapers, and wide-angle shots of pedestrians evade conventions of the genre and assert the artist’s modern and inventive sensibility. Instrumental in introducing a vocabulary of formal abstraction into American photography at a time when descriptive realism was the dominant aesthetic, Callahan employed techniques of extreme contrast (Bob Fine, c. 1952), reduction of form (Telephone Wires, 1945-76), and multiple exposure (Chicago, 1948) to present the everyday urban environment from unexpected points of view.
[Image: Harry Callahan “Chicago” (1949) gelatin silver print 7 3/4 x 9 5/8 in.]
Media
Schedule
from January 09, 2014 to March 22, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-01-09 from 17:30 to 19:30