From Library Journal
This excellent collection of Callahan's photographs accompanies a national tour of his work. Curator Greenough's (Robert Frank: Moving Out, LJ 10/15/94) decision to arrange the images chronologically works well to illustrate both the themes central to the photographer's aesthetic and his development as an artist. From early experiments using multiple exposures and light painting to the most recent color cityscapes, Callahan has sought to explore photography's potential. He often returned again and again to the same subject in a quest for yet a new way to "see" it via the camera. Now in his eighties, Callahan is a 20th-century master of American photography who places the highest value on the process of self-realization through image-making rather than on any individual photograph or series of photographs. His life's work stands as convincing testimony to this ideal. This retrospective will be a fine addition to public and academic photography collections.?Kathy J. Anderson, Indiana Univ., BloomingtonCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Photographer Callahan has been at the top of the list for half a century (he had his first one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948), and because his pictures have been so individual, so elegant, so purely seen, they are as fresh today as ever. The plainspoken Callahan decided early that photography could be the medium for "some set of values that I am trying to discover and establish as being my life." He has never focused on public themes, however, but on familiar landscape and one particular woman, his wife, Eleanor. Inspired as a young man by the spectacular images of Ansel Adams, Callahan nevertheless did not require sublime landscape as material. His visual poetry has come more often from a few blades of grass or a barren city street. A pure photographer, concerned with what he calls "the standard photographic problems" --focus, contrast, selection, motion, and multiple exposure--Callahan has maintained remarkable consistency of vision as well as a most individual voice. This book, cataloging a major retrospective exhibition, is the broadest overview of the art and the man. Even collections with much Callahan material (there is no dearth--he is well documented) should add this summative, definitive volume. Gretchen Garner

From Book News, Inc.
Catalogue for an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and scheduled to travel to a number of cities during 1996 and 1997. Unlike other exhibitions of Callahan's work, this one organizes his photos chronologically, rather than by subject, describing the growth of his visual life from its genesis in Detroit in the early 1940s, its flowering in Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s, and its maturation in Providence and Atlanta in the years thereafter. Greenough's essay discusses his artistic vision. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Review
"'Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure,' Callahan has stated. 'If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.' Looking then at this adventure, this remarkably clear and straightforward life, the pictures, every one of them, tell the story. Harry Callahan is his work. And therein lies his legend."--Arno Rafael Minkkinen


Book Description
Harry Callahan, known for his bold exploration of quotidian details and his innovative use of the abstract in photography, has created a career that spans many eras and lives. From his extended portrait of his wife, Eleanor, to his formal studies of architectural structures and his observation of abstract expressionist line in natural forms, Callahan's remarkable work has been central to the development of American photography. The influence of his labors is easily recognized in the work of many disparate genres of visual art. His photographic legacy continues on not only in the vibrancy of his own images, but in the unparalleled inspiration his teaching has brought to many.

Aperture's Masters of Photography series presents Callahan's most vital and lasting images, in addition to a number of photographs that have never been published before. The accompanying essay by Jonathan Williams, poet, essayist, and the publisher of Jargon Society books, provides a unique textual complement to the subtlety of Callahan's work and vision.


About the Author
Harry Callahan was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1912. A self-taught photographer, Callahan began his career at twenty-six and immediately earned artistic credibility that continues to thrive today. His tenure at Chicago's Institute of Design (1946-64) and later, the Rhode Island School of Design (1961-77), helped to establish the study and practice of photography as a formal academic discipline in the United States. Callahan has been awarded a grant from the John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, the Graham Foundation Award for advanced studies in fine arts, and the National Medal of Arts.