A WILLING MODEL: Eleanor, New York (1945). |
"I think I've photographed the same things all my life," Harry Callahan said in 1991. "Buildings and grasses and people walking." And, for a stretch running from about 1941 to 1963, that included his wife, Eleanor.From these modest subjects, Callahan (1912-1999) became one of the legendary American photographers who moved the field from the close observation and documentary photography of the '30s into post-World War II surrealism, abstraction, and process-oriented experimentation. And he's one of Providence's own legends because he founded the Rhode Island School of Design's photography department in 1961 and taught there until he retired in 1977.
"He just liked to take the pictures of me," Mrs. Callahan told me when she came up from her home in Atlanta last week to see "Harry Callahan: Eleanor," which is on view at the RISD Museum (224 Benefit Street, Providence, through February 15). "In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing. I never had any fear. Harry could do whatever he wanted with me and my body."
The couple married in 1936. Eleanor didn't share her husband's passion for photographing, but she was a willing model. And though he began teaching photography at Chicago's Institute of Design in 1946, her secretarial work was the family's primary income for much of their life together and bankrolled his art.
The Chicago school followed a Bauhaus model — interested in the fundamentals of mediums and techniques. Callahan fit in well with his restless cool Modernist formal experimentation. His results are hit and miss.
The Eleanor photos that get most reprinted in history texts tend to have a tender, elegant, sensuous feel. A 1948 shot shows Eleanor, with eyes closed, topless in a lake, her long wavy hair floating in the water, like some 19th-century pre-Raphaelite birth of Venus. Another photo is a classical nude study of Eleanor seated in a dark room, lit by sun from a dormer window. A third shows Eleanor staring straight at us with her arms folded over her head. She seems boxed in by the tightly-framed composition. Elsewhere Callahan focuses closely on Eleanor's naked legs and behind, and bleaches out details, until her contours become an erotic abstracted line drawing.
But the more than 80 photos in this show, which was organized by Atlanta's High Museum of Art, are mainly a detached, analytical case study of all the permutations possible from a single subject: surreal multiple exposures (Eleanor's face a ghost behind a web of grass), dramatic light studies (Eleanor and daughter Barbara, who was born in 1950, spotlit in a Chicago alley), awkward deadpan poses (Eleanor standing nude against a dark radiator in the otherwise empty expanse of their loft-like Chicago apartment), and seemingly intimate family moments (Eleanor, standing, nude, seen from behind as she holds baby Barbara, who faces us over her shoulder). We get little feel for who Eleanor is, but that's not Callahan's point. Her body is a form for him to examine.
