Exactly What Is a Photograph?

By ROBERT HUGHES

One of the most eye-haunting images in the big retrospective of 195 photographs by Harry Callahan is called simply Eleanor, Chicago, 1949. It is the broad, pale face of a big-jawed woman--in fact, Callahan's wife, Eleanor Knapp--rising from Lake Michigan. Her eyes are closed. Her dark hair, parted in the middle, falls in thick ropes that swash in the water. Because the body is hidden by the murky wavelets, the head has a dreaming, apparitional quality, a look reinforced by the waving tendrils of hair. Yet nothing about the photograph invites one to read it as a narrative of emotion. The camera's rendering is exceedingly spare, fastidious in its detachment. Its formal rigor--down to the last rhyme between the wet locks and their paler shadow on the water's wrinkled skin--is intimidating. This Midwestern naiad, one realizes, is Callahan's Mona Lisa.

At 64, Harry Callahan undoubtedly ranks as one of the world's great living photographers. His work has never reached a mass audience, however, for he has done no photojournalism and he has had no spectacular subjects: no sublime vistas of landscape (unlike his early mentor, Ansel Adams), no wars, no beautiful women. To earn money, he taught photography classes--since 1961 he has presided, diffidently and sometimes with an acute resentment about wasted time, over the department of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. His public utterances are few, and his letters, if one can judge from the excerpts quoted in MOMA's elegant catalogue, are among the dullest ever written by a major artist. ("Our Peru trip wasn't too great . . . Cuzco was good but really just another Spanish city with Indians.") No matter. Since 1938, when he bought his first camera--he was then an accounting clerk with the Chrysler Corp. in Detroit--Callahan's entire work has been directed with obsessive, addicted purity to one chief question: What is the exact nature of a still photograph, and what marks it off from any other kind of visual image?

Reeds in Snow. In the Depression years that problem was not often raised What counted more was photography's role in the class struggle. No photographer who, like Callahan, spent his time clicking away at reeds in snow or telephone wires against a blank white sky could be credited with much social commitment. Callahan's desire to rescue one formally perfect image from a thousand failed slices of life seem priestly now, but it must have looked solipsistic then. "His aim," writes MOMA's director of the department of photography, John Szarkowski, "has been not to bend photography to his purposes, but rather to immerse himself in its will--to make himself its instrument and servant." The point is symbolized by an early photograph in the catalogue of Callahan at work, pointing a bellows camera at the reedy edge of Lake Huron 36 years ago. His head is hidden under the cloth; he looks like a camera-headed wading bird, patiently dabbling for nourishment. The man and the machine are one hybrid.

The clarity of registration in Calla han's pictures flows naturally from th camera's function as a precision instrument. Usually there is a sense of meditative arrest, as if the shutter really had stopped time, giving the images a most singular density. Callahan's visual world is not very busy. We are invited to scrutinize a nude body reduced to one exquisite line formed by the cleft of the buttocks and the thighs, against a white ground; and we do so with gratitude. If Ingres had been a photographer he might have arrived at images like Callahan's: subtle, disciplined, but above all as unrhetorical as classical art should be.

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