From Library Journal
This excellent collection of Callahan's photographs accompanies a national tour of his work. Curator Greenough's (Robert Frank: Moving Out, LJ 10/15/94) decision to arrange the images chronologically works well to illustrate both the themes central to the photographer's aesthetic and his development as an artist. From early experiments using multiple exposures and light painting to the most recent color cityscapes, Callahan has sought to explore photography's potential. He often returned again and again to the same subject in a quest for yet a new way to "see" it via the camera. Now in his eighties, Callahan is a 20th-century master of American photography who places the highest value on the process of self-realization through image-making rather than on any individual photograph or series of photographs. His life's work stands as convincing testimony to this ideal. This retrospective will be a fine addition to public and academic photography collections.?Kathy J. Anderson, Indiana Univ., Bloomington
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Booklist
Photographer Callahan has been at the top of the list for half a century (he had his first one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948), and because his pictures have been so individual, so elegant, so purely seen, they are as fresh today as ever. The plainspoken Callahan decided early that photography could be the medium for "some set of values that I am trying to discover and establish as being my life." He has never focused on public themes, however, but on familiar landscape and one particular woman, his wife, Eleanor. Inspired as a young man by the spectacular images of Ansel Adams, Callahan nevertheless did not require sublime landscape as material. His visual poetry has come more often from a few blades of grass or a barren city street. A pure photographer, concerned with what he calls "the standard photographic problems" --focus, contrast, selection, motion, and multiple exposure--Callahan has maintained remarkable consistency of vision as well as a most individual voice. This book, cataloging a major retrospective exhibition, is the broadest overview of the art and the man. Even collections with much Callahan material (there is no dearth--he is well documented) should add this summative, definitive volume. Gretchen Garner
