Harry Callahan : The Photographer at Work
by Britt Salvesen, John Szarkowski

This book has been a major creative whack on the side of the head for me. I first heard about it at The Online Photographer. Callahan is a photographer I've heard a little about and I've seen some of his photographs but overall I've not know a lot about him. While this book has a great collection of photographs, worth the price of admission, what was inspirational for me was the text which talked about how he worked. Quite a breadth of output, from 35mm street photography to 8x10 (that's the negative) "snapshots". He used all the tools: 35mm, 2 1/4, 4x5, and 8x10. An exploring mind. From Amazon:

Bringing together images from a career spanning 60 years, this catalogue commemorates Harry Callahan's singular photographic achievement. Among the volume's 120 plates are photographs of weeds and grasses arranged against the sky, women captured anonymously on street corners, intimate portraits of the photographer's wife, seemingly unremarkable streetscapes and snapshot-like outdoor portraits of Callahan's wife and daughter. Rarely iconic but always unexpectedly eloquent, Callahan's compositions reveal the idiosyncratic approach he developed after emerging from the influence of modernist giants Stieglitz and Adams, and retain a lively, searching quality befitting the work of a man who once said, "I think that when you get a style, you're sort of dead." Essays by John Szarkowski, former director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art; and Salvesen, curator at the Center for Creative Photography, make clear that the serendipitous, almost offhand elegance of Callahan's oeuvre came as the result of a lifelong commitment to the daily practice of photography, and contact sheets, slides, proof prints and negatives from the Callahan archives attest to his rigorous work ethic. With enough archival material and previously unpublished work to distinguish it from existing books on the artist, this work serves as both an introduction to the photographer and an essential volume for Callahan devotees.

As an aside, I had a friend who studied under Callahan and Rhode Island School of Design. It was this same friend who inspired me to make my leather straps (He thought thin leather straps were more then adequate for holding up cameras.) and he gave me a camera that had been his father's, a 4x5 Graflex SLR. I lost touch with him years ago. I wish I hadn't.

One more thing. This is a book that I ordered through my library. They didn't have it and, at my request, they bought it. So nice of them. Now I don't want to give it back. I make keep it a little longer. I may have to buy the damn thing.

Harry Callahan