Calahan, Harry - ELEANOR - what a wonderfull book! new in plastic!

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Steidl; 01 edition (22 Oct. 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3865214649
• ISBN-13: 978-3865214645
• Product Dimensions: 26.4 x 2.3 x 30.7 cm
• new in plastic!

This is the definitive publication of Harry Callahans photographs of his wife, Eleanor. For almost two decades from the early 1940s to the early 1960s Eleanor was a primary focus of Callahans work, resulting in many of his most acclaimed and influential photographs. This publication features the finest and rarest examples of his Eleanor images. This in-depth presentation of a single subject over many years provides a new understanding of both Eleanor as a subject and Callahans ongoing exploration of the creative potential of photography. Over the years Callahan photographed his wife in countless ways: nude and clothed, indoors and outdoors, in public parks and city streets, at the beach, in a tent, in the woods, among sand dunes, and in the privacy of the family home. She is shown as a youthful model recorded through pregnancy and young motherhood, and in numerous poses with their daughter, Barbara. These photographs function like an intimate visual diary of a lifestyle and a relationship. They are seldom portraits in the traditional sense of revealing a subjects personality. More than studies of his wife, the Eleanor photographs are central to Callahans life long exploration of photography as a creative medium and the seemingly infinite ways camera and light sensitive materials can depict a single subject.

About the book:

For much of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, photographer Harry Callahan's wife, Eleanor, was his most regular subject. She stares out of his acclaimed work, sometimes sharp and sometimes blurred, sometimes Classical and sometimes Modern, in public parks and city streets, at the beach, in a tent, in the studio and their home, nude and clothed, eventually pregnant and then mothering. The couple's longstanding collaboration makes up an intimate visual diary of their relationship and of Callahan's artistic exploration: these are seldom portraits in the traditional sense. More than studies of Eleanor, they are stages in Callahan's lifelong exploration of photography as a creative medium, showing his embrace of an array of materials and techniques, including highly detailed large-format negatives, distortions of movement and focus, silhouettes and multiple exposures. The subject was always Eleanor, but there were always new ways of seeing her.

Biography

Harry Callahan was born in Detroit, studied engineering at Michigan State University, and worked for Chrysler before taking up photography as a hobby in 1938. Callahan cited a visit by Ansel Adams to his local camera club in 1941 as the time he began to view photography seriously. Self-taught as a photographer, he found work in the General Motors Photographic Laboratories. In 1946, shortly after meeting László Moholy-Nagy, he was asked to join the faculty of the New Bauhaus (later known as the Institute of Design) in Chicago, where he became chairman of the photography department in 1949. He left Chicago in 1961 to head the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he remained until 1973. He has won many awards for his photography, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 and the Photographer and Educator Award from the Society for Photographic Education in 1976, and he was designated Honored Photographer of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France in 1977, and received ICP's Master of Photography Infinity Award in 1991. Among the major exhibitions of his work were Photographs of Harry Callahan and Robert Frank (1962), one of the last shows curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art (1976) and at the National Gallery in Washington, DC (1996).
Callahan was widely respected in the photography community for his open mind and experimental attitude, qualities reinforced by his association with Moholy-Nagy and the principles of Bauhaus design. He produced work in both formalist and more documentary modes, and worked in both black-and-white and color. He used a 35-millimeter and an 8x10 camera, and worked with multiple exposures as well as straight images. Such versatility contributed to his success as a teacher, his students ranging widely in style--among them Ray K. Metzker, Emmet Gowin, Kenneth Josephson, and Bill Burke.
Lisa Hostetler