THE MULTIPLE IMAGE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HARRY CALLAHAN

Harry Callahan

8.5 x 8.5 saddle-stitched softcover book with one-page text by Jonathan Williams followed by seventeen well-printed halftone photographs on fourteen plates with facing captions. Printed by Heritage Printers.

Callahan's scarce first book, published while Callahan was the head of the photography department at The Institute of Design of The Illinois Institute of Technology. These multiple image photographs from the 1940's and 1950's are among the most experimental of his long career. Imagery includes cityscapes of Chicago and Detroit, nudes of Eleanor, and trees.

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) was born in Detroit. He had no formal training as a photographer and according to his own writings he was 'terrifically naive,' which he considered his great strength. He was a hobbyist until 1941, when he saw work by Ansel Adams and was then inspired to search for his own photographic style. Throughout his career, Callahan explored a number of different subjects including landscapes, city streets and pedestrians. He masterfully offered glimpses of the ordinary elements of life in an elegant, modernist style. Callahan also explored many different techniques including the use of extreme contrast, collage, multiple and time exposures, and camera motion. In 1946 Callahan became an Instructor at the Institute of Design (1946-49), and later Head of the Photography Department at the ID (1949-61). He went on to teach at the Rhode Island School in of Design in 1961 and finally retired in 1977 after a successful 50-year career as a photographer and educator.

One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including László Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind.

In 1937 László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian Jew fleeing Nazi Germany, was brought to Chicago by the city's industrial leaders to establish a school of industrial design to be modeled after the original Bauhaus in Germany, the pioneering school of art, design and architecture where Moholy had taught previously. Although the New Bauhaus lasted only one year (1937-1938), it was quickly reorganized as the School of Design (1939-1944) and eventually became the Institute of Design (1944-present). The photographs produced in the ID's early years were controlled studio experiments, more concerned with form and materials than with imitating works by photography's masters or documenting the world. Moholy's photograms, for example, are elegant light studies that reveal the complete scale of gray between black and white and illustrate photography's abstract potential.

Along similar lines, faculty member György Kepes (1906-2001) produced an extensive series of photographs of his wife in which he explored solarization and negative exposure and even painting on the picture's surface. Nathan Lerner (1913-1997), a student and later teacher at the ID, worked with refractive lenses and photomontage and used his light box to test the pictorial effects of pure light. Another student, Milton Halberstadt (1919-2000), produced a triple -exposed portrait to showcase photography's capacity for simultaneous vision. At a moment when American photography was largely confined to more conventional portraiture, landscape or documentary reportage, these experimental and abstract pictures revealed the enormous creative potential of the medium.

As the school grew, Moholy hired Arthur Siegel (1913-1978) and Harry Callahan (1912-1999) to lead a new, four-year program in photography. After Siegel resigned, Callahan hired Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), and the two formed a superbly effective teaching team that is now legendary. Under their leadership, the program's emphasis shifted from experimentation toward the development of individual vision and subjective expression.

Callahan invented problem-related exercises such as documenting the alphabet in the environment to encourage students to work in series, and Siskind developed an exercise to discover forms in plants. Students worked in groups to create documentary projects and individually to create sustained photographic series for their theses. Many of the ID students also hit their photographic stride in their thesis projects, including Joseph Jachna (born 1931), who studied the changing forms of water; and Ray K. Metzker (born 1931), who turned his camera on pedestrians and shadows in Chicago's Loop.

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