Harry Callahan; Modest Giant of 20th Century Photography

Harry Callahan, a modest giant of 20th century photography who infused his pictures of ordinary people and places with dignity and grace, died Monday night at his home in Atlanta of cancer. He was 86.

Known for delicate landscapes, intimate street scenes and an ongoing series of portraits of his wife of 63 years, Callahan is remembered as a gentle innovator who merged formal aesthetics with street photography and influenced hundreds of students during 30 years of teaching.

Perhaps as famous for his reticence and reluctance to theorize about his work as for his generous spirit, Callahan likened his photographs to prayers and attributed his success to luck. When you take a picture, “you’re offering a prayer to get something, and in a sense it’s like a gift of God because you have practically no control--at least I don’t,” he wrote in a publication surveying 40 years of his work.

“He will be sorely missed,” said Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Harry Callahan was one of those great artists who have a certain humility about themselves and their work and its place, and gave freely.”

Photography specialists rank Callahan in the top echelon of the field with better known artists including Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

“He was one of the greats who followed in the tradition of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s new Bauhaus school in Chicago, as well as one of the first to really make an aesthetic statement out of street photography,” Sobieszek said. “And the formal aspects of his work--his sense of art and design and pattern--were unparalleled.”

Throughout his 60-year career, Callahan photographed a wide range of subjects, but his longtime portrait of his wife, Eleanor, is a continuous thread. Unlike Stieglitz, who photographed his wife, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, for a few years when she was quite young, Callahan took pictures of Eleanor for decades, Sobieszek said. “And this is a sensitive, loving portrait of the woman he shared his life with--a subject of love, not an object of love.”

John Szarkowski, retired director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, also views Callahan’s private sensibility as a unique virtue. “The point is not merely that Callahan has responded faithfully as a photographer to the quality of his own life, or merely, even, that photography has been his method of focusing the meaning of that life. The point is that for Harry Callahan photography has been a way of living--his way of meeting and making peace with the day,” Szarkowski wrote in “Looking at Photographs,” a book of 100 notable pictures in MOMA’s collection.

The son of a Midwestern farmer who moved to Detroit to work in the automobile factories, Callahan was born Oct. 22, 1912, in Detroit. He studied engineering at Michigan State College in East Lansing, then went to work in the accounting department of Chrysler Motors. Although he had no training in photography, he joined the company’s camera club at 26 and discovered his professional calling. He soon purchased his first camera, a Rolleicord 120, and became an active member of the Detroit Photo Guild. The rule-bound structure of the guild didn’t suit him, but when Adams gave a workshop there in 1941, Callahan gained new confidence in his ability to see pictures in his own surroundings.

He found work in his new field at General Motors’ photographic laboratories, but his professional breakthrough came in 1946, when he became an instructor at the Bauhaus-inspired Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. His experimental work had captured the attention of Arthur Siegel, a teacher at the institute. Siegel drove Callahan to Chicago to meet Moholy-Nagy, the founder of the institute, who immediately hired the young photographer.

Callahan taught there until 1961, when he was hired as chairman of the new photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He remained on the faculty there until his retirement in 1977. Among dozens of well known photographers who credit him as a mentor are Emmet Gowin, Ray Metzger, Linda Connor, Kenneth Josephson and Joseph Sterling.

Callahan seemed to understand his abilities very well and he identified his artistic goal early. “The thing that sets him apart is that he hit the ground with extremely well-formed pictures,” said Peter MacGill, a director of Pace Wildenstein MacGill gallery in New York, who worked with Callahan for 26 years. “He was very successful and original from the beginning. But he had a continuous drive and an extraordinary ability to reinvent the same subjects.”

Callahan had no interest in dramatic landscapes, famous people and bizarre spectacles, but he loved experimenting with high contrast, multiple exposures and unusual effects of sunlight and neon. His work evolved from black-and-white to color, and ranged from near-abstractions of nature to portraits of weary pedestrians. Many of his late works--including quiet shots of drifting clouds and stone walls--were done in Atlanta, where he and his wife moved in 1980 to be closer to their daughter, Barbara.

Like Stieglitz, Weston and Minor White, Callahan “was one of the few great photographers who grew to develop a late style,” Sobieszek said. “Harry’s views of dark grasses around the interstate near Atlanta are some of the great pictures of his career and the great pictures of the 20th century. They are so unassuming, and yet they are filled with a kind of grace and grandeur of nature that I see in few other pictures.”

Callahan’s exhibition record, beginning in 1946, includes dozens of solo shows in prominent galleries and museums. He was the first photographer to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in 1978. The Pompidou Center in Paris presented a major retrospective of his work in 1990. The National Gallery of Art in Washington organized another retrospective in 1996, which traveled to museums in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit and Chicago.

The recipient of many prizes and honors, Callahan won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 and the National Medal of the Arts in 1997. His work is in the collections of many important repositories of photographs, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has more than 50 prints encompassing his career, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has more than 30 works by Callahan in its photography holdings.

Callahan is survived by his wife and daughter.