Harry Callahan — Variations — Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 7 → December 19, 2010

Fondation HCB presents an exhibition of work by American photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999).

For the Month of Photography’s thirtieth birthday, the MEP has made available a large number of works from its collections. Fondation HCB has chosen an important body of work by Harry Callahan, including photographs from the collections of the Peter MacGill Gallery, the MoMA in New York, and the Thomas Zander Gallery. This selection of about one hundred prints provides an opportunity to discover Callahan’s favourite subjects — the city, his family, and Nature: three threads closely linked to his private life, which were to remain entwined until the end.

Subjects included the city (mainly pedestrians lost in thought in Detroit, Chicago and Providence); his wife Eleanor and their daughter; close-up details of landscapes without skies (except in the Cape Cod series). Callahan was not interested in narrative photography. He was an intuitive photographer who had complete faith in the medium. His intimate obsessions are part of the essential rhythm of his work: “I wanted to see how many different kinds of pictures I could put together using variations on an idea”, he said.