“Harry Callahan (1912-1999) is
regarded as one of the most innovative and influential artists in the
history of 20th-century US photography. Deichtorhallen Hamburg is
taking the artist’s creative intensity, the aesthetic standing his
oeuvre enjoys in the context of 20th-century US photography and the
fact that 2012 marked the 100th anniversary of his birth as an
opportunity to present his oeuvre in an extensive retrospective with
over 280 works from March 22 through June 9, 2013. The exhibition is
to date the most extensive show of his work, and includes both his
black-and-white gelatin silver prints and his color works produced
using the dye-transfer process.
Harry Callahan was one of the first to
overcome the prevailing aesthetics of Realism by advancing the New
Vision, which László Moholy-Nagy had established in the New Bauhaus
in Chicago, and Ansel Adams’ so-called “straight photography”
in an innovative, highly sensitive way. Between 1946 and 1997 the
Museum of Modern Art in New York alone honored Callahan’s
photographic oeuvre in a total of 38 exhibitions. Together with the
painter Richard Diebenkorn, Callahan represented the USA at the 1978
Venice Biennale, the first photographer ever to do so. Nonetheless,
in Europe Callahan’s multifaceted work is still considered a rarity
in the history of photography.
In addition to photographs of nature
and landscapes, Callahan’s oeuvre, spanning a period of nearly 60
years as of 1938, embraces pictures of his daily strolls through
cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Providence, Atlanta, and New York.
Portrayed frequently in very intense light, his leitmotifs were
streets, shop windows, buildings and pedestrians hurrying past. Very
early on he regarded photography as a purely artistic medium, and saw
himself as an art photographer rather than a representative of
applied photography. In later years other works, in which his wife
Eleanor and daughter Barbara were the focal point, were superseded by
another major experiment: the photographs he took on numerous trips
to France, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, and Ireland. His works document
the emergence of Modernism, which was taking an ever-greater hold on
everyday life. Relating to his three main themes, nature, the
familiar figure of his wife Eleanor, and cities, Callahan’s images
reflect his life in ever-new references that become increasingly less
interwoven with one another. At the same time they trace the social
and cultural transformation in the USA discreetly, elegantly, and
with a tendency to abstraction, recording the changes as a
seismograph does earth tremors. In his images Callahan consistently
reflects on both his own and the camera’s way of seeing..."(artblart.com/tag)
No comments:
Post a Comment