The Harry Callahan Donation

In 1956-57, while living in Aix-en-Provence on a grant from the Graham Foundation, Harry Callahan took a series of landscape and cityscape pictures. He has donated the entire series to the collection of The Maison Européenne de la Photographie they are an important stage in the development of his style. The series, "French Archive", which contains about 130 original prints (mostly unknown) have been selected by Harry Callahan and Peter MacGill.

Biography :

Harry Callahan was born in 1912 in Detroit, Michigan. In 1938, while working as an engineer for Chrysler, he began taking pictures as a hobby. In 1941, after attending some lectures by Ansel Adams, he decided to become a full-time photographer. However, in contrast to the richness and lyricism of Adams' Western landscapes, he preferred austere and graphically simple scenes, creating bare, even minimalist, images. In addition to his landscapes, he produced cityscapes and numerous portraits of Eleanor, his wife since 1936. In 1946, he began teaching at the Chicago Institute of Design and was director of the photography department from 1949 to 1961. In 1956, he received a grant from the Graham Foundation and spent fifteen months in Europe, mainly in Aix en Provence. It was during this period that he produced "French Archive". Returning to the United States in 1958, he left Chicago and continued teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design until 1977. With a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, he travelled to Mexico in 1972. In 1975, his archives (correspondence, papers, photographs and negatives) were acquired by the new Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. A retrospective of his work was organised by the M.O.M.A., New York, in 1978.