Tag Archives: Harry Callahan

Coursework, Learning Log, Part 2 - Street and studio, Photographers, Project 2 - The aware

Project 2 – The Aware – 2

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When thinking about portraits as well as considering who you are going to photograph (Project 2 – The aware) you also need to consider where. Just as dividing up who you are going to photograph you can also divide up the place into types:

  1. Inside – examples of these are the June Street images by Parr and Daniel Meadows, Daniel Meadows 2 and the Mother series by Paul Graham
  2. Outside – many of the images of Eleanor taken by Harry Callahan

Both of the places can be further subdivided into:

  1. A natural environment – the images by Sian Davey in Martha and Looking for Alice.
  2. A studio, which can be further divided into:
    1. Formal – an example of this is the work Gone Astray by Clare Strand where people are photographed against a backdrop of a Victorian type frame
    2. Informal – the work of Irving Penn in Worlds in a Small Room could be considered as a relatively informal studio, in that it was portable, although it became more fixed as time went on. A more informal studio was shown in Daniel Meadows Omnibus Project where he travelled around with a converted bus.

Interestingly there is a recent series of work by Sandro Miller shown on Lenscratch  I am Papua New Guinea available at:

http://lenscratch.com/2019/10/sandro-miller-i-am-papua-new-guinea/

In this Miller went to Papua New Guinea on three occasions, set up a studio and offered the chance for people to come and have the photographs taken in all their finery. The images, although mainly in colour, are strongly redolent of Penn’s images of a similar area of the world. Like Penn, he noted that many of these people have had little or no previous awareness of a camera. However, Miller’s images do give more of a feeling of the person rather than just the exotica and he identifies the people both by name and tribe, rather than showing a group of images that are exciting but impersonal.

An example of photographs of people taken mainly outside, in a ‘natural’ environment, is the work of Andrea Modica – Treadwell.  Treadwell is ‘a place in the imagination…. a fiction about a little girl growing up’ (Modica and Proulx, 1996).  In the initial essay by E.Annie Proulx,  Modica describes how she  ‘entered into an intimacy with the situation of place’ and took a series of pictures, not all in the ‘real’ Treadwell that tell the life of a girl growing up in a series of decayed farmhouses and crowded places. The places are allegorical, essential to the meaning, often ghostly or reminiscent of death. Without the landscape the story would not be present. Without the children there would be nothing but depression and misery. Both together give a possibility of hope.

References:

Drew, R., Chandler, D., Eskildsen, U., Jeffrey, I., Mullen, C. and Strand, C. (2009). Clare Strand : a Photoworks Monograph. Brighton: Photoworks ; Göttingen, Germany.

Graham, P. (2019). Mother. S.L.: Mack.

http://lenscratch.com/author/aline-smithson (2019). Sandro Miller: I am Papua New Guinea. [online] LENSCRATCH. Available at: http://lenscratch.com/2019/10/sandro-miller-i-am-papua-new-guinea/ [Accessed 11 Nov. 2019].

Modica, A. and Proulx, A. (1996). Treadwell. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Penn, I. (1974). Worlds in a Small Room. London: Secker & Warburg.

Siân Davey (2015). Looking for Alice. Great Britain: Trolley Ltd.

Siân Davey (2019). Martha. Hertfordshire: Trolleybooks.

Coursework, Part 2 - Street and studio, Project 2 - The aware

Project 2 – The aware

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With the exception of candid street photography all images of people involve some degree of awareness on the part of the subject. However, the degree of involvement does vary. It can be divided into 3 main types:

  1. The subject is having their portrait taken on one occasion either as:
    1. A deliberate choice on the part of the subject such as a formal portrait
    2. A choice on the part of the photographer such as a requested photograph of a stranger in the street. Examples of these are the June Street series by Daniel Meadows and the work done by Tom Wood see:  Project 1 – The unaware – 2 where he became the Photie Man.
  2. An ongoing portrait series of a person or a group of people either taken over several days or even years where the subject, although known to the photographer, is not emotionally involved. An example is the series in the face of silence (Agou, 2011) by Christophe Agou.
  3. An ongoing series of portraits of someone who is well known to the photographer such as family or a close friend. Examples here are Mother (Graham, 2019) by Paul Graham and Big Brother (Quail, 2018) by Louis Quail and the photographs of his wife Eleanor by Harry Callahan.

Another example of type 3 is Looking for Alice by Siân Davey in which she tells the story of the life of her daughter, Alice, who was born with Down’s Syndrome and the impact this has on the family’s life. In the foreword she says ‘the process of photographing this work has helped me shine a light on why I struggled to love Alice, which was essentially fear and uncertainty …. she is now in the middle of everything that we do as a family and is loved unconditionally’ (Davey, 2015).  Davey went on to produce a book of images about her older daughter, Martha, at her request (Davey, 2019). She talks at length about her life and motivation for taking these images in a podcast  A Small Voice – Siân Davey.

These categories can become blurred, especially the latter two, when a series continues over several years. This is very noticeable in the work for every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness (Germain and Snelling, 2014) by Julian Germain, where he started off with an unknown subject Mr Snelling, who he got to know very well over several years, with the images becoming more intimate over time. Another example of the blurring between a subject and a friend occurs in Nina Berman’s book An Autobiography of Miss Wish (Berman and Stevens, 2017) in which she initially meets a stranger, a drug addict and a prostitute on the street and over many years develops a friendship that includes housing her for a time and being her sponsor. The final book is a collaboration between Berman and Miss Wish (Kimberly Stevens) and includes both photographs, copies of her medical documentation and drawings done by Stevens.

The skills needed for all portraits of aware subjects include (in no particular order):

  • The ability to make a connection and read the person and therefore show their feelings
  • Real engagement to build trust – possibly very rapidly in a one-off shoot
  • The need to keep separate your emotion and the subjects (they may be the same – or very different) – and the photo will depend on how you interpret them
  • Patience
  • The ability to think about the whole image, not just the person. Both the content and the framing are important.
  • The need to choose between either being an observer (neutral) or a participant (a director) – both can work well but probably not in the same image
  • Consider lighting – inside or outside, natural or flash, soft or hard – what will show what you need?
  • Get permission which may be explicit (in writing) or implicit (the person sees you pointing the camera at them and agrees by not turning away)

A useful reference book which discusses these points is on the Portrait and the Moment by Mary Ellen Mark (Mark, 2015).

References:

Agou, C. (2011). In the face of silence. Stockport: Dewi Lewis.

Berman, N. and Stevens, K. (2017). An Autobiography of Miss Wish. Heidelberg: Kehrer.

Davey, S. (2015). Looking for Alice. Great Britain: Trolley Ltd.

Davey, S. (2019). Martha. Hertfordshire: Trolleybooks.

Davey, S. and Smith, B. (2017). Siân Davey. [online] A Small Voice. Available at: https://bensmithphoto.com/asmallvoice/sian-davey [Accessed 22 Oct. 2019].

Germain, J. and Snelling, C. (2014). For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness: portrait of an elderly gentleman. London: Mack.

Graham, P. (2019). Mother. S.L.: Mack.

Mark, M.E. (2015). on the portrait and the moment. New York Aperture.

Quail, L. (2018). Big Brother. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing.

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Coursework, Learning Log, Part 2 - Street and studio, Photographers, Project 2 - The aware

Harry Callahan

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Harry Callahan (1912 – 1999) was an American photographer based in Chicago. He taught at the Chicago Institute of Design and then at the Rhode Island School of Design. He took many street photographs with a heavy contrast of black and white. However, he also took images of his wife and daughter, often set in the distance against the city. This contrasted with other very simple images of trees against the sky, patterns in the sand. He also combined many images to make multiple exposure prints – although it is not clear whether this was done by multiple in-camera exposures or by overlaying prints. He shot thousands of pictures but produced very few finished prints. He was an experimental photographer, trying out a range of possibilities for the subjects he was interested in. He is reported as saying ‘I guess I’ve shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like” (Artnet.com, 2019). He also said, “The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively — intuitively — the camera can write poetry.” (Cassidy,2006).

Eleanor
© estate of Harry Callahan – Eleanor

References:

Artnet.com. (2019). Harry Callahan. [online] Available at: http://www.artnet.com/artists/harry-callahan/ [Accessed 16 Oct. 2019].

Cassidy, V.M. (2006). Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work – Photographs by Harry Callahan | LensCulture. [online] LensCulture. Available at: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/harry-callahan-harry-callahan-the-photographer-at-work.