Photo by Callahan
- Finished off the Friedlander book’s opening essay. Relief. Galassi is not super fun to read. Tosser.
- Good end though: “‘Incessantly’ is if anything an understatement. Having long ago made the labours of discipline into the instincts of habit, and having still earlier obliterated whatever barrier might once have existed between his thirst for experience and his compulsion to make pictures, Friedlander pursues his profligate passion with undiminished pleasure. The consequent outpouring of photographs can seem as inexhaustible as it is fascinating, but so is the world.”
- Saw that Szarkowski had written the introduction to Harry Callahan’s book. Reading that.
- Callahan took up photography at the late age of 26. The film camera was too expensive apparently.
- Having a quick look at Callahan’s photos you can see he must have had the shortest attention span in the entire world. He prefigured a lot of stuff though, his pictures have drastically different looks. Prefigured some of my close up work, but probably with a zoom, the pictures are flat and the detail is not there. But his aesthetic was very clean usually.
- “In the same year he made his photograph of reeds in water ‘Detriot, 1941’. It seems to Callahan that he was as good then as he would ever be.”
- “It is well known that genius has reasons of its own, and that artists are not produced by a standard method. But is also known that artists are not produced by auto-synthesis, out of vapours and wishes, and that new art grows out of old art.” I’m not so sure about this. Initially I thought he was going to go down the deliberate practice path, but no.
- “An artist’s starting point is his understanding of the Tradition—a great floating thieves’ market of parts and schemes, made up of remembered works, dead and living rivals, cafe conversations, museums, and credenda.
- During his novitiate, the artist constructs from these sources a private, imperfect, more or less serviceable theory concerning what has been achieved so far, which serves as a bench mark from which his own advances are measured.
- “Yet in spite of all this perfection the pictures were not sterile but full of force; they were machines that worked.”
- He went against the grain of concerned work that was being done then.
- “In a letter to Todd Webb, he noted that the idea of concerned photography seemed to be attracting considerable attention and support, and added, ‘too bad for unconcerned slobs like you or me.” I wrote something very similar to friends in the past: “look on the web, and on video at all these concerned photographers, writers, activists and I balk. They seem so simple, so naive, so unsophisticated. I can’t help but see a significant, and valid history for poverty, conflict etc. I can’t make the leap to wanting to make it better, or believing it should necessarily be different.”
- S. goes on to say that it is not enough for a picture to have content, that content must be tautly held in a web of form, otherwise it falls flat to the ground. (My metaphor).
- “Callahan did somehow arrive quickly at the sure knowledge that the function of his own work was to describe not the public issues of the great wold, but the interior shape of his private experiences. As a position, it was presumably neither better nor worse than any other, except to the degree that it give energy to talent.”
- Deeply affected by Adams’ Surf Sequence.
- “The cool and distanced eloquence of Callahan’s work is presumably not only a formal matter. His pictures do not describe but embody a world of moral value, a world aspiring to perfect order.” The perfectly opposite method of Winogrand, but to the same end?
- Ah, he was a committed Christian who became an agnostic in college. Left a hole in him though. I wonder how much my loss of faith has motivated my faith in art. But it was always so.
- “Shaw’s figure suggests the quality of blind, intuitive need, and there is in the work of most exceptional photographers, and surely in Callahan’s, a sense of compulsion, a need to know the world through photographing it.”
- “But no important photographer since Eugene Atget has shown less inclination than Callahan to theorize about his medium or his own work.”
- Callahan himself: “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 row as a person and growing makes you want to show more of life around you. …
- I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor but I believe they develop my seeing and help later in other photos. I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.”
- “The ambience of the Institute of Design was in fact a shock to Callahan, since the place was filled with people who liked his work and seemed to understand it.” Went against his artist as lonely hero idea.
- Callahan: “It has been very hard for me to teach here at the school. I am so completely non-verbal. Photography seems so simple to me that there doesn’t seem to be much to say.”
- “Like many powerfully motivated artists, Callahan is not naturally gregarious. … One senses in Callahan a large capacity for privacy—for an interior life unshared even by those closest to him.” The artist nourishes himself. “Nevertheless, friends are important even to the most self-sufficient of artists—important for their ideas, for the comfort of their support, and for their companionship, when work is impossible or intolerable.
- His friends: Hugo Weber (an intellectual painter), Mies van der Rohe (sometime drinking companion), Aaron Siskind (eloquent photographer), and Steichen. S. says that none of these really affected Callahan’s art.
- Callahan: “Beethoven for instance—his early music sounded like Mozart, and the he worked, the son of a bitch—he didn’t wait a year and write another Mozart, he just kept working until it blasted out, and contributed something altogether new.” Work.
- He is nourished by boundaries, conceptual, or geographic, or technical.
- On the heads stuff that he did: “The technical problems were formidable. To stop motion of the subjects at such close range required a much faster shutter speed than the film of the day allowed in the shadowed city street. Furthermore, the problem of focusing accurately on a close-up moving subject would be almost impossibly difficult. To further complicate the issue, Callahan would also be a pedestrian, photographing as he walked, in order to avoid drawing attention to himself.” Fuck! Welcome to my world! He had to push his film speed significantly, my work is a continuation of this.
- “On the mechanical level of athletic skill, the problem was perhaps no more difficult than wing-shooting woodcock. On an artistic level, the instantaneous, intuitive decisions required were comparable perhaps to those of musical improvisation.”
- A lot of his skyscaper work prefigures Michael (what’s his name)’s work in Hong Kong and Chicago.
- Callahan worked in camera as much as he could and would tenaciously solve problem after technical problem.
- “And on occasion he refers to the greatest problem of all—the difficulty of waiting confidently for the next really good pictures: “I still am very tormented about my photography—it hasn’t been good for a long time. There is still some faith laying around somewhere though.”
- “It is the artist’s faith that discoveries made on such specialised journeys of exploration are somehow consonant with the hidden structures of larger designs.”
- “Most (not all) great photographers have loved photography, and have, more to the point, trusted it—have been willing to follow it some considerable distance on faith, intuitively persuaded that the patterns of its mechanical logic are instructive, elegant, and not yet exhausted.” Winogrand did too. Do I? Write an essay on why I hate photography.
- Callahan: “I am sure of one thing: I want to photograph. I want to search around and find out what will motivate me to photograph—I mean to make a real photograph. I could go to Cape Cod and look down at the sea; I could stand in the middle of Providence and photograph the people, photograph their faces, their arms, their legs—I have just got to figure out what works. If I were to decide I was going to photograph the sea, and that would be it, that would be ridiculous. I mean I would have to go photograph the sea for awhile, and if that didn’t work. I would have to go photograph something else. So you can’t make those decisions. It’s not in your hands.”
- His pictures are good, but of things that I just can’t take seriously.
- Only photographed women with his close in shots. They are good.
- Did some cool collages.
- Lots of kind of interesting double exposures.
- Some things very Bauhaus inspired, in the mode.
Posted 2 years ago
