Harry Callahan, “Ivy Tentacles on Glass”, 1952

#somereallygoodones, #harrycallahan, #eleanor, #secrets, #enigma, #PortHuron

Harry Callahan’s “Eleanor, Chicago," 1949 is the classic; it is iconic. It is “his Mona Lisa of post-World War II photography.” *1 But I use this image as an example of how great photographs have secrets.

A few year later he was able to bring his fresh way of seeing to the abstracted landscape of “Ivy Tentacles on Glass”, 1952, looking like animal scratches on a cave wall. Seeing the unknown in the natural world.

It bears a kinship with the works of Robert Ryan and Cy Twombly other painters of the era, but this is photographic. He is not shaping and changing; building up or scraping away the surface.

He works with such restraint. It’s as if he were breathing on the lens and leaving the barest of images. His grasses feels different forth images of Eleanor and his daughter, Barbara.

I don’t really like to meet famous artists because I think it’s an imposition on them and it ends badly for me. Callahan had a huge retrospective at The National Gallery in Washington DC. I went to pay homage, and after touring the exhibition, a friend asked if I wanted to meet him. I should trusted my instincts and said no, but agreed. By the time we got across the lobby to the receiving line, I was quietly anxious and overwrought. Callahan had had a stroke and looked exhausted. We got to him, My friend said Harry, this is Bill Hunt as I put out my hand awkwardly suddenly realizing why he wasn’t shaking hands. I burst into tears as blurted out “Port Huron” which is a small town in Michigan north of an even smaller town, St. Clair, in which I grew up. Callahan did a lot of work in and around there, but he appeared to have no idea what I was talking about.

I felt like I was having a stroke right there in front of him.

*1 Page 36, The Unseen Eye; Photographs from the Unconscious” (Thames & Hudson, Aperture, Actes Sud, 2001)

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