Word: callahans
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...SONNY CALLAHAN (R) District 1 (Southwest--Mobile...
...also the contemplative, hard-to-characterize pictures of Callahan, who picked up the line of hard-focus lyricism from an earlier generation of photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston. The lesson of their work was that clear, sharp pictures could still have something unearthly about them--when considered in high detail (and in the proper frame of mind) even a patch of moss can look like a message from God, or a projection of the unconscious, or an emblem of the soul. With Callahan, it's not always clear just which of those directions he's pointed...
...early prints are not much larger than a playing card. At that palm-size scale the solid world starts to dematerialize. Trees in the mist become twigs. Grasses reflected in water, as in his early picture Detroit, look like not fully legible scribbles of some force behind creation. Callahan shared with the Abstract Expressionist painters a penchant for the sublime, but he worked toward it from a different direction. They preferred wall-size canvases, a match for the presumed immensities of the spiritual realm; he made pictures the size of an intuition...
...metaphysical impulses notwithstanding, what engaged Callahan most was matters of the here and now, things like the unyielding mystery of other people and the intricacies of the visual world. For a time he repeatedly photographed his wife Eleanor, often in the nude. As muses go, she's nearly as familiar now as Rembrandt's wife Saskia or Picasso's serial wives and mistresses. But it would be a mistake to suppose that we know much about her from these pictures, where her impregnability is the plainest thing about her. For Callahan she's the human conundrum at the heart...
Even when he practiced a kind of documentary photography, Callahan made personal and social realities indistinguishable. In 1950 he started taking candid close-ups of pedestrians, mostly women, in downtown Chicago. He would approach them without letting his camera show, then suddenly point their way and snap. What he found each time was a look of troubled introspection, the face as an anatomy of melancholy. Their eyes are veiled. Bits of jewelry bristle around their necks and ears in defensive perimeters. Yet while all background detail has been excluded from these pictures--the head fills almost the entire frame--they...