PICTURES FROM AN INTUITION

By Richard Lacayo

NO ONE WOULD DISPUTE THAT Harry Callahan has a reputation. He's a venerated name in postwar photography. What he lacks is a legend, the personal drama that turns a mere photographer into a cultural celebrity. Diane Arbus had her demons. Robert Frank has his melancholy. Richard Avedon has his glamour, so much of it that Hollywood turned his life into Funny Face. Callahan taught art school in Chicago and Providence, Rhode Island. Not much of a role there for Fred Astaire.

It is his fate that, at 83, Callahan is known almost entirely by his work. But it is work of sufficient power and mystery to have opened up some new lines of feeling in 20th century photography, above all a kind of dry-eyed romanticism, subdued but haunting. In his matter-of-fact pictures of his naked wife or in his radiant seascapes, the world is both plain and pregnant with hidden meaning. Everything is seen through the filter of his yearning for understandings that are always just out of reach. The Callahan retrospective that continues through May 19 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, then moves to Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit and Chicago, makes one thing plain: if he ever develops a legend, it will be the story of a man who brought a unique intensity to the discovery that what the camera might give him was a glimpse of his own internal life.

Callahan started to take pictures regularly in 1938, when he was a shipping clerk at Chrysler in Detroit with an amateur's interest in cameras. A brief workshop with Ansel Adams, who passed through town in 1941, confirmed photography not just as his profession but in some sense as his calling. Callahan decided he was an artist, and it turned out he was right. Within seven years he had made some of his most enduring pictures, held the first of a long line of exhibitions and saw his work on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

By that time he was also teaching photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago, a transplanted version of the Bauhaus, the great German laboratory of art and design that was shuttered by the Nazis. But the original Bauhaus aim of placing art in the service of socialist ideals didn't survive the trip to Chicago, because after 15 years of Depression and war, American artists were wary of politics. What they wanted was the luxury of a private moment and the refuge of a private space where they could lock out the sinister noise of history. Among photographers, that meant that the subjects of what used to be called concerned photography--the migrant workers of Dorothea Lange, for example, or the G.I.s of Robert Capa--lost some of their claim on the imagination. The icons of the 1950s would be personal and a bit inscrutable, like the quasi-mystical nature studies of Minor White and the abstract close-ups of torn posters by Aaron Siskind.

And 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 in. He hasn't been much inclined to publish long statements of philosophical intent. But he manages all the same to imply that there's more at stake in his pictures than meets the eye.

That may help explain why so many of his 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.

His 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 of the world. Lounging naked in a bower, she's the Eve in his Garden. Emerging from water with her eyes shut, her hair dripping and her breasts just visible beneath the surface, she's everything that's inward looking, tantalizing and self-contained.

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 still hint at something about the larger world. What they tell you is that every crowd is the sum of its brooding enclosures, that city life is a jam session of personal discontents.

At the heart of Callahan's best pictures, like the one called Eleanor, Chicago, is a romantic disposition satisfying itself through a bare minimum of means. Eleanor, a bed, a window full of light--he could get what he was after with no more than that. Like a kid playing with the surf, he would run up to the edge of a cliche, then scurry back. You see it best in an actual beach picture like Cape Cod. The immensity of the sea and sky, art's oldest shorthand for the ineffable, is kept in perspective, visually and psychologically, by the volleyball net at the water's edge. In this particular corner of the sublime, what's human is still the measure of all things.

What you learn from Callahan's work is subtle but not complicated. One lesson is that the things of the world are strangely beckoning, and the simplest of them can have a powerful claim on our feelings, though sometimes for reasons we don't quite get. Another is that the camera's inability to penetrate surfaces is in some ways an advantage. It's an equivalent to our frustrated yearning to comprehend the incomprehensible. Still another is that the picture goes on developing in the viewer's mind. It would be fair to say that these are some truths of photography generally. So what made Callahan an artist? Maybe just that he understood them.