Harry Callahan

Callahan is known for his lyrical and original way of viewing the everyday in both urban and natural environments. He began making photographs in 1938 while working for Chrysler Corporation in Detroit. A workshop with Ansel Adams, famed and admired for his sharp-focused, majestic views of nature, awakened Callahan to the potential of the camera. He was also introduced by a colleague, Arthur Siegel, to László Moholy-Nagy’s experimental approach at the New Bauhaus School of Design (founded 1937) in Chicago. With remarkable insight, Callahan combined Bauhaus innovation with a belief that the medium could express a personal vision. Within the first few years of the 1940s, he developed nearly all of the subjects that would sustain him through a life in photography. Moholy-Nagy hired Callahan to teach with him in 1946 at the reincarnation of the New Bauhaus, the Institute of Design (from 1944), Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, where Callahan continued until arriving at RISD in 1961.