INTERVIEW: “Harry M. Callahan Interview, February 13, 1975″

Eleanor, Chicago, 1953

Interview with Harry M. Callahan, Conducted by Robert Brown in Providence, RI, February 13, 1975

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Harry M. Callahan on February 13, 1975. The interview took place in Providence, RI, and was conducted by Robert Brown for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The quality of this recording is uneven due to mechanical difficulties.

TAPE 1, SIDE A [45-minute tape sides]

ROBERT BROWN: This is an interview in Providence, Rhode Island, with Harry Callahan. It’s February 13, 1975. Mr. Callahan, you come from Detroit.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you fairly early, as a child, encouraged in the arts at all?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No.

ROBERT BROWN: What was your background?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, I don’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure my family, my parents, were farmers in the beginning, and then they came to Detroit and worked in an automobile factory there. And so, I mean, they spent their time just raising kids [laughs] — us three kids — and so I don’t think that . . . I would say we weren’t encouraged or discouraged or anything in terms of the arts, I don’t think. Father liked music but he didn’t go on to anything — classical music, things like that.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you have some fairly vivid memories of childhood? Any time that sticks in your mind?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, no, I guess not. [chuckling] I wouldn’t say I had a bad childhood or anything. It seemed like I did a lot of playing, a lot of sports. I suppose the thing . . . . When I was like in high school, anything that would have, indicate arts . . . I used to like to read mythology and The Iliad and The Odyssey and I think that interested me most, that I can remember. But I always did like to draw, but it was dumb. I just copied other images out of the comics or something like that.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you think this interest in mythology was a kind of a fantasy life? Did you have that as a child?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: May be. I certainly like to read it; I remember that much. I read all I could in the library. I think one thing that I seemed to feel in terms of my photography was that when I was younger my mother was pretty strong on religion. And, well, I felt very spiritual about that, you know. I didn’t know anything. I’d just go to Sunday School every Sunday. But at a certain stage in my life I felt like I wasn’t doing anything and felt, well, I should do something to benefit humanity. And I had friends, and we talked about religion and they finally talked me out of it. [laughs] And I agreed with them, in that it was just another form of witch doctor to me, you know.

Eleanor, 1951

ROBERT BROWN: To you it was?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. And so I felt I had to have something to take that place. And with photography, when I happened to get started in photography, all of a sudden it did that for me. And that’s the way I always feel about my photography is that I want it to have something spiritual in it that makes somebody feel something. I’m not interested to any real extent in saying something in the sense of, “This is a bad society” or social, anything like that.

ROBERT BROWN: Not preaching?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No. I don’t feel like I know enough to do that. But I feel . . . I just go by . . . my photography is intuitive, I would say. I have to think, naturally, but I don’t . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: You didn’t suppose it would say something? Did you think photography could say something to people? What did you think the purpose could be of your photography?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, I always figured that if it moved the spirit in human beings, then that’s what I wanted to do. And I think that’s the way I listen to music and that’s the way I read and everything else, is to be moved that way. I missed the preaching part and everything else.

ROBERT BROWN: When did you start taking photographs?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I started in 1938.

ROBERT BROWN: This was after you’d already been studying engineering at Michigan State?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. That didn’t work for me, I don’t think . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: It seemed to be probably just an obvious vocation out there in Detroit, wasn’t it?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, well, I just . . . . My father always said he wished he’d have had a chance to go to . . . he got pulled out of school in the eighth grade. That’s as far he got. He always wished he could have gone to school. So that always made me feel I ought to go to school. But it never was the right place for me. I should have never . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Your parents . . . you seemed to have a sense of duty to your parents when you were a boy? You mentioned your mother wanting . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. I don’t know whether it’s that . . . I suppose I do to a certain extent, but maybe it’s just that you’re affected by them, that’s all.

ROBERT BROWN: And those two years in engineering were . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, they were very . . . they were a waste.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, what happened . . . . I graduated from high school during the Depression, and all through school I would go along and get very poor grades and maybe get set back or put way down. And then my mother would go to school and talk to somebody, and then I’d work hard and I’d get up to the top. I don’t mean the top of the class, but I mean the top ten percent. And when I got to high school, I just daydreamed and it took me five years to get through high school. [laughs] And some friend of mine said — and this is the Depression and you couldn’t get jobs anyway — and he said, “If you take a post graduate course and you get a ‘B’ average, you can go to college.” So I took a post graduate course and I got two A’s and a B. So I got a guy I had . . . my physics teacher was a good guy, and he wrote me a real good letter and that was it. So I went to college. And then that was no good. I mean, I just had these little spurts every now and then when I could study.

ROBERT BROWN: And there was no direction?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No, that’s right.

ROBERT BROWN: No real momentum then?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, right, yeah.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, in ’38 then did you come to get into photography?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, a friend had a movie camera and I got real interested. And then I went down to see about buying a movie camera and the guy, salesman, when he told me how much it was all going to cost . . . I ended up buying a still camera, which I’m very happy about.

ROBERT BROWN: You first thought maybe the movies were going to be more exciting?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, it wasn’t . . . I just didn’t . . . just that camera, I guess, got me. It was just fascinating, and, then, I hadn’t even given a thought to still photography. So when I saw all those gadgets . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: How did you begin? You began by sort of experimenting with the gadgetry?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, no, I just . . . I got this camera and I then sort of found out that I knew somebody who knew how to develop and print and so I . . . . He didn’t know much, but he knew something. So we just started doing our own photography in the bathroom with a funny enlarger. Then [I] got more and more interested, and I met a fellow in the Detroit Camera Club — or the Chrysler Motors Corporation Camera Club — and we got to be very good friends. He’s still a friend of mine. We really started photography together.

Eleanor, Chicago, 1949

ROBERT BROWN: Who is this?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Todd Webb. He’s a very good photographer. He’s in England right now. But we’ve been in touch for all these years now.

ROBERT BROWN: And did you right away when you looked at your first results . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, I didn’t know anything what I was doing. Just . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Did you like them?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, I guess because they came out! [laughter] But I got a few pictures. Later on, after I’d seen what other people did in the camera club, I got these things that looked kind of good to me. But I felt kind of frustrated, things seemed all wrong. They had a fellow, I forget what … I think his name was Fossbender. He came and gave a talk to the Detroit Camera Club. And he did all kinds of manipulation with paper and paper negative stuff. And he painted out pictures and painted in things, and stuff like that. And he says, well, “Now you people, it’s going to take years to ever get to be this good.” And I thought “Oh, God, I don’t want to go through that.” I wasn’t really nuts about what he was doing anyway, but I was impressed. Then Ansel Adams came. And you probably know of Ansel Adams.

ROBERT BROWN: Yes.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. He showed his work, and it was all straight photography — sharp and beautiful prints and everything else, and that just completely set me free. And then both my friend Todd and I were just . . . we just went all nuts on photography. We really felt confident in ourselves and everything else.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: He was just there about two or three days. Well, he was there a couple days, and then he went to New York and then he came back and we went on a field trip. I got a notebook when we went on the field trip and finally one minute when there was nobody bothering him or anything, I asked him if I could ask him questions and he said, “Sure, yeah, I’m glad to have somebody ask me something.” So I just took notes on everything. I asked him what kind of lenses he used, what kind of film, what kind of paper, what kind of developer. Put it all down and that was my bible for over a year. I wouldn’t dare use anything different.

ROBERT BROWN: Then when you saw how sharp and crystal clear the image could be, this is what set you and your friend off?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Right. Because we knew that it wasn’t this murky junk this other guy . . . . The camera was a machine and it could make machine-like pictures which were very beautiful. So, oh yeah, that’s what really got us going.

ROBERT BROWN: And these machine-like effects, the very precision of these effects, this is what captivated you rather than playing with the emulsion and tones and painting them and . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, yeah. Well, it’s just that it could get such texture — you know, that was just magnificent to me, and I immediately got a bigger camera. I got an eight-by-ten camera, and just contact-printed my pictures because that was the sharpest you could get. But after a while, I felt the need of enlarging, so I . . . . When I did get 35 millimeter I only enlarged about that much because the . . .

ROBERT BROWN: About half?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: . . . it would be pretty close to the quality.

Eleanor and Barbara, 1953

ROBERT BROWN: What did you think . . . what did you admire in the sharp image, do you think? What is it that attracted you to it?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I have no idea. That’s a real weird thing. I’m still that way. I just look at something and first I think I see how sharp it is. [laughs] No, it’s something to do with the lens.

ROBERT BROWN: Did this draw you to sharp, precise forms at that time, such as, maybe, buildings?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh. Well, I think that right after that — I was photographing buildings — I was photographing everything anyway, but I did more nature photography because Ansel Adams’ pictures were all nearly . . . at that time what he showed were Yosemite and things like that. And so I think I just sort of . . . we got interested in Weston then, and so we sort of did West Coast pictures, I guess.

ROBERT BROWN: In Detroit.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: In Detroit, right. [laughing]

ROBERT BROWN: You’d been married in, what, ’36 or so?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: And did your wife share these enthusiasm and interests, pretty much?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No No, I . . . for a while I really wanted her to, but then I realized that that wasn’t what she wanted to do, so I just kept it for my business.

ROBERT BROWN: Yeah. Although later she’d become the principal subject for your studies.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, yeah. Right.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, the education then in photography was this informal level. And particularly these notes you took with Ansel Adams. You mentioned also here that Alfred Stieglitz, his photography and his ideas were something of an influence.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, yeah.

ROBERT BROWN: Can you pinpoint that?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, everything all happened then. I met Ansel Adams. That put me in a new world. And he talked about Stieglitz. And so then I wanted to read about Stieglitz. S I read about Stieglitz, and I started collecting classical music then. So, every way I was moved into the . . . into, let’s say, the classical world or something, in the fine arts world. And so, yeah, there had to be some kind of a hero, I guess, and so I guess Stieglitz might have been it for a while. And I went to see him. I guess that he was. . . he created an aura of some kind, and everybody treated him like he was a god. And so I think that all added to the thing, you know.

ROBERT BROWN: You were impressed when you met him?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, this had been built up so much in books and magazines that I couldn’t think any other way. [laughs] No, they wrote books of America and Alfred Stieglitz, and everybody wrote about how great he was. And, yeah, I think I was impressed. I think the nice thing about it, though, as part of my growing up, I realized that he was just another man, and then I thought . . . I actually thought better of him in a way.

ROBERT BROWN: What did he actually say to you when you met? Do you recall anything he did?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. Well, I went there and I said, “I’d like to see your pictures.” And he said he didn’t show his pictures anymore. And then after maybe a little while he said, “Oh, yeah, this was the early phase.” He called some guy there, who worshiped him, to have him show me some pictures. So he took me in the back room and this fellow showed me the pictures and he gave me a big spiel on it, I suppose, like Stieglitz would have done. But then after quite a while I came back to the room where Stieglitz was and there were several people in there and he was very nice. They ordered some ice cream or something. Wanted to know if I’d like some ice cream. And then I said, “Do you think you were ever influenced by Ansel Adams?” [laughs] Can you imagine? And he says, “No, I don’t think so.” I mean, he was about eighty years old and . . . . [laughter] I don’t know where I ever thought of that.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, Adams had been such a strong . . . .

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, right, and then the pictures that I saw were nature, were ones of nature, of Stieglitz.

ROBERT BROWN: Did Stieglitz . . . was he the kind that would have admitted, do you think, if he’d been influenced?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, I don’t know. I think so. Yeah, I think he would.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you get the feeling he was sharing something with you when you were with him? As a younger, a young photographer?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I don’t know whether he knew I was photographing or not. I don’t know; I felt good about it. I went back to see him. I was living in Detroit then, and then later on I went again and I didn’t really like seeing him. He seemed kind of odd. But my friend Todd Webb got to be very close to him. He used to . . . . Well, Todd, he used to tell me stories about Stieglitz, so I knew he got to be very friendly with him.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you and Webb . . .

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: We’d been photographing together.

RB. . . . close?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, real close, yeah.

ROBERT BROWN: You pretty much . . . did you discuss what you were doing quite a lot?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: All the time, yeah. He became a very good documentary photographer, and he had a lot of . . . . Stieglitz wanted to give him a show at the American Place, and Steichen used to show him a lot at the Museum of Modern Art. But he felt that he had become a documentary photographer, and he turned a nice living at it.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you at all ever interested in that?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I didn’t even know what it was, really. You know, I mean, I just . . . he didn’t know it either, you know. I mean he just all of a sudden, he says, “I’ve realized I am a documentary photographer.” So his first decent pictures like were when he came home from the war. He was in the Seabees, and he saw all the “Welcome Home” signs in New York: “Welcome Home, Vito,” you know, the Italian part, and they had put these big signs up. And he had a very strong feeling about that and he made excellent pictures. And I think those were the first ones that Stieglitz really liked. But then he did a lot more.

ROBERT BROWN: What did you do during the war?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I was a 4F.

ROBERT BROWN: And then in ’44, when you were at GM [General Motors--Ed.], I think, doing . . . . Was that just sort of a . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Printing. Making prints.

ROBERT BROWN: It was a living.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Right, yes, I learned a lot there, though. It was all technical, naturally. I think I learned an awful lot there. I’m a little slow technically, and I think that I got a lot of help there and didn’t realize it.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you enjoy doing it?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No. [laughs] Certain parts of it I did because I enjoyed printing the contact prints, and so they let me do that. There was an inspector there. He inspected all the prints to make sure that people were printing good. He was very good and I got a kick out of him and I’d show him when I thought I had a really good print, and he knew an awful lot about the technique of photography.

ROBERT BROWN: What was the purpose of these photographs at General Motors?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, all kinds of publicity things — model shops and what do they call exploding shots? You take a transmission and then they set it all up so that you can see how it all goes together, and that really . . . . One guy was special at that, an awful job. There were a lot of portraits and things. And they asked me if I would like be a photographer and do illustrative photography, and I said no, because I felt that that would contaminate me. You know, I didn’t want to affect my feeling with that kind of thing.

ROBERT BROWN: You thought you’d have to follow their script?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, right.

ROBERT BROWN: That wasn’t a very attractive prospect for you. Well, in ’45 you must have gone right away to New York?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Right.

ROBERT BROWN: On what you’ve called a “personal fellowship.”

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. Then my friend Todd was there, too.

ROBERT BROWN: He was there?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, we had . . . . Well, it actually was my idea to go there and he’s the one that stayed and I didn’t. But, well, I photographed, just photographed, walked the streets, photographed every day — and he did, too. But he did better there than I did. I was all upset. It was more like Puerto Rico. It just didn’t work for me.

ROBERT BROWN: Didn’t work?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: The wrong time or something, you know.

ROBERT BROWN: How do you feel when something doesn’t work? Does this happen very often?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. In think in my case — and I think other people, too — that you could go along and you’re . . . . It hit real good for a while and then you’re down in the dumps and nothing works. It’s the impractical business of an artist, I guess.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, sure. When something’s not working, when you look at a photograph, what does it seem to lack?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, it just has no feeling, no spirit to it at all. I mean, it just . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: A visual blank?

ROBERT BROWN: [chuckles] Yeah . . . yeah, that’s it. [laughs]

ROBERT BROWN: Then, by the next year, you were in a way sort of picked up by being hired in Chicago, with the Chicago Institute of Design, the Moholy-Nagy thing.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Right. Well, Arthur Siegel, who I used to see in Detroit, he was one of the few people that . . . . Well, he was kind of a leader in Detroit.

ROBERT BROWN: You mean technically or in art?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, all ways, in every way. I didn’t gravitate to things that he had to say until Ansel Adams came. Ansel Adams was just really . . . it’s impossible to say. He just released me. I don’t understand any other way to describe it.

ROBERT BROWN: He was the first guy you saw that could really show special stuff?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yes. His work was . . . stood for what he talked about, you know. I guess that’s about what it amounts to. I don’t think he could talk as good as this Siegel. But his photography was superb.

ROBERT BROWN: Whereas Fossbender, his work didn’t stand for . . . .

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, no, it didn’t stand for . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: He was a “tricks” man.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. So, later on as I did work I would show it to Siegel and he liked it, and so when he became the head of the department in the Institute of Design, with Moholy, he wanted me to come there and teach technique. So I didn’t know anything about teaching, anything. It was terrible. But I hung around all the classes and learned how they taught and then I did it. [chuckling]

ROBERT BROWN: How were you supporting yourself till then? In Detroit? And in Chicago?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, let’s see. We had saved up this money, you know, and, as I say, to take this “personal fellowship.”

ROBERT BROWN: Right, after you’d worked in the General Motors photo lab, right?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, right. So, I think we went through the winter in New York and then came home. I looked for a job and I couldn’t get jobs, but my wife got a job. And, well then, while I was there in Detroit, why Siegel came along and invited me to come and see Moholy and see if he would hire me.

ROBERT BROWN: One of the first things you did was watch their classes and see how they were teaching?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: When I got there, yeah.

ROBERT BROWN: Did that give you any confidence?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, I was terrible. It always has been terrible. And I guess that maybe just affected me.

ROBERT BROWN: Was Moholy-Nagy . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, the way they taught it I thought was outstanding. So that . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: How was that then? Can you describe that?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, they . . . . As I look at the Bauhaus (this was like the New Bauhaus) as I understand it, they took each medium and they analyzed it and such, and then say what . . . . Now, the machine, for instance, used that to make simple furniture, not Chippendale, so that’s our technology, you see. You can make a real simple thing with a modern technology. And that the camera will give tone and texture, and they just analyzed all the things that the camera could do, that the materials could do, and then they said don’t mix it up with painting. You know, painting can do this. You know, photography is tone and texture. That was me all over. You know, I mean, I’d never put it into words, but then I had done multiple exposures and so they did all kinds of things like that. I had done the series photographs, and these were all assignments that they gave. And then that was very exciting to me because I invented new assignments, too. It was just at the time of my life where there was a lot of fun. I used to pick up things for the students to do. And they worked, because it came out good that way.

ROBERT BROWN: Was Moholy the. . .

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, see, I didn’t see much of him.

ROBERT BROWN: . . . in charge of it?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh yeah, it was his school.

ROBERT BROWN: What was he like, as far as your affiliation with him went? You didn’t see him much, but what was he . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, Siegel took me there and Moholy wasn’t at school. He was down on a farm that they had, that the school had, that [Walter] Paepcke of Paepcke Container Corporation lived on.

ROBERT BROWN: Yeah, who was the chief patron.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, he was the chief patron. And so Mololy said, told Siegel to say, well, to tell me that he couldn’t hire anybody but he would talk to me. And I was so damned mad I went from Detroit to Chicago. [laughs] And I didn’t know Moholy. I didn’t know anything about that Bauhaus or anything like that. He wasn’t anything special to me. [laughs]

ROBERT BROWN: That’s for sure.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: And so Moholy looked at my things and he said, “All right, now when you come to the school . . . . ” And he said he’d only once before in his life that he’d been moved like that by somebody’s work. I was all ready to tell him off if he didn’t like my work. [laughs] So it turned out . . . . Well, he . . . . So I saw him then, and then at school he was so busy and they moved from another building, and so we didn’t have any darkrooms and everything was wrong. He was just running around from one place to another trying to hold the school together. He was a very brilliant person. He could call the school together and in a half hour give a beautiful lecture — on anything, practically. So he just kept it together. We couldn’t do much, I mean we didn’t have darkrooms. Then he was gone a lot. He was a very busy person. He’d designed the Parker Pen, you know.

ROBERT BROWN: Yes.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: He did all kinds of interiors. He did everything to raise money to get that school going.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you think you contributed to getting it going? Were your courses popular? Did you have a loyal group of students?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, yeah. Yeah, over the years that’s worked out real good. Well, the department was . . . not only was it murder for me, but Siegel, who was the head, he’d been through the first year that they taught. But there was no second year and there was no third year and there was no fourth year. We just went along improvising all the time, and if I hadn’t had some good, faithful students, I’d have been out of there long . . . . Well, I think I contributed a great deal over the years, I guess. I brought Aaron Siskind there, and he and I really built the program that’s just, you know, something . . . . Siegel always said he did it all, he laid it all out for us, but he didn’t know what he was doing then. I mean, it wasn’t, nothing against him, but . . . . He had a lot of ideas, but people have to go through school before you know what it is.

ROBERT BROWN: Right. And you stuck with . . . the students stuck with you and he quit?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, yeah, he had an awful time. Moholy demoted him, and then when Moholy died, then Chermayeff, the new director, reappointed him because Siegel was a very literate person. He could speak well. He knew the history of photography very well. He knew an awful lot about art in every way. Very well read, smart guy. He just for some reason couldn’t function. I don’t know what was wrong. He didn’t show up to classes, and I don’t know, he had an awful time.

ROBERT BROWN: Whereas you stuck with your students.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah.

ROBERT BROWN: You worked in the lab and that was just the way they got to learn, right?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yes, Well, there were other teachers there, too, and they stuck with them. It was just Siegel wasn’t their hero, unfortunately.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, this school, then, in ’50 became part of Illinois Institute of Technology.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Formerly, think it was the Armour Institute or something like that.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, that was . . . . Yeah, you’re right, yeah. Well, it actually didn’t, as I was saying, developing this program, whatever it was or whatever it amounts to, when Siegel left — and I think I had one year without him — and probably the second group of undergraduate students graduated . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: So that would be about four years after you first came?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, yeah. And I just, you know, I just sighed, you know, real relief, God. And two of them came up to me, just before they were leaving, and said they wanted to take a master’s degree. And I’d never heard of such a thing. [laughs] So I went to Chermayeff and I said, “Well, what can I do with these guys?” Because we were part of IIT then. And they would allow a master’s.

ROBERT BROWN: You barely created a Bachelor’s degree.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. We hadn’t even done that yet.

ROBERT BROWN: At least you got them through four years.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Got them through, yeah. And so I went to Chermayeff — he was a very well-educated person actually — and he says, “Well have them write up a point of direction for what they’re going to do.”

ROBERT BROWN: Yeah.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: A direction and purpose or something like that. So these two guys wrote it up and so we let them do it. That was okay. It scared me at first, but then we just worked and just let them do what they said they were going to do and so . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: You found that was a good thing, once they’d reached a certain point, an independent kind of point?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Right, yeah, and that’s the way we do it now.

ROBERT BROWN: Right. So Chermayeff had come from a broad educational background.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, he was . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: He was interested in innovation or . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: He was interested in the Bauhaus, I think. That’s probably one of the reasons they brought him, because he had been involved with it — intellectually, at least — and he liked the different things that they did. And he liked photography. He was good that way, but he was a tough guy to get along with.

ROBERT BROWN: What kind of students did you get there in the immediate post-war years? Were these a lot of GI Bill?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, GIs, yeah, that’s right.

ROBERT BROWN: What were they there for, do you think? Aside from . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I don’t know. That was another tough thing because none of us were really oriented in terms of teaching somebody how to do photography for a living. I mean, Siegel had earned a living at it and he could do something, but he wasn’t interested in it either. So the GIs were really . . . a lot of them wanted to know, find out how they could earn a living.

ROBERT BROWN: A vocation.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, right. And so that was difficult. That part of it was really difficult. But I didn’t have too much to do with it. There was a commercial photographer there, too, and he told them a lot of stuff. I don’t think we did good that way. I don’t think we ever have. A lot of our people have made a good living, but there wasn’t specifically . . . . We were never teaching them that way. But I think we taught them, maybe, you might say fundamental things: how to think about stuff, you know, that allowed them to tackle jobs.

ROBERT BROWN: Probably a basic strength. They could do or not do something with it.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Right, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Is that the old argument between the theoretical and the applied?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah.

ROBERT BROWN: In the Illinois Institute, was there pressure to be practical?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No. No, they didn’t.

ROBERT BROWN: Theoretical studies were found.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, they let us go.

ROBERT BROWN: Was your program of teaching photography fairly early well known in the country?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I think the Institute of Design was probably one of the first good photography departments in the country. I’m not sure, but I think it must have been. Moholy treated it with equal interest as painting or sculpture or anything else. There are places like, I guess, Winona . . . I think it’s in Ohio or something. And I think RIT, Rochester Institute, I think that’s been going for a long time, but that was mainly photography whereas this is the whole broad deal, you know

ROBERT BROWN: Yeah. You were set right up there with the accepted people in fine arts?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Fine arts, right. They didn’t want it that way. Moholy believed in terms of design and function as earning a living, too. But he didn’t believe in the trade school concept.

ROBERT BROWN: But they had to have this basic training in fine arts . . .

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah.

ROBERT BROWN: . . . before they then even thought about the application of it?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, he did an awful lot of designing and application himself, so he . . . a lot of that would get into the design part of the school. But photography hadn’t been developed. That’s the whole trouble. It had always been done a lot. I really don’t think departments were very developed in any area. I think it wasn’t until after the war that Moholy had the money to . . . and the students! Maybe he could have had the money before, but he didn’t have any students.

ROBERT BROWN: And the chief beggar was Paepke.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I guess so. I would never know what it would amount to, but he was certainly . . . Moholy certainly mentioned him a lot.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you exhibiting by this time?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh. When I went to New York, Nancy Newhall, I think, showed one of my pictures in the Museum of Modern Art, a color show of some kind. And she — I don’t know whether it was her or somebody showed some in a magazine called Mini Cam, and there was a fellow kinda liked my stuff and wanted me to do an article and I did an article for that.

ROBERT BROWN: This was in ’45 or something like that?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think I really started exhibiting until Steichen . . . . I can’t remember my first exhibits now. Steichen showed me at the Museum of Modern Art.

ROBERT BROWN: In ’48, In and Out of Focus?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I think I had little exhibits, you know, like a little gallery in Chicago or something like that.

ROBERT BROWN: What was the effect of these Museum of Modern Art shows?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, that . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Beginning in ’48. What did that mean then? Was Steichen a big figure with photography?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. But Chicago wasn’t considered. No. But he was a big figure. And he turned out to be a real, you know, break for me, because he came to Chicago and he looked at my things and just about every year from then on he’d always show some of my work in a group show. So it became a regular habit for me to take my work about every year to New York. And then Steichen would look at it and take out some and maybe show it. So that was a . . . well, that was a real wonderful relationship there. He was a really remarkable man and an outstanding photographer and bright and capable. Gee, he was something. He was a . . . in the first World War, he was the head of Army photography, aerial . . . made aerial stuff and that’s where he said that he really found out that photography should be sharp, because you can’t take the repeat. [laughing] And then the Second World War, he was in charge of the in a Navy unit. And he was a successful painter. And he really was the first guy that brought modern art to the United States, when he said . . . he had Stieglitz show Picasso and Cezanne and, you know . . . . So he did all kinds of things. So that was a terrific relationship, because, you know, to see somebody operate like that.

ROBERT BROWN: And you hit it off with him?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yes, he . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Apart from your work?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, oh, yeah, he was a . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: He became a friend?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Right.

ROBERT BROWN: Would he regularly come out to Chicago to look at things there?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, he did a lot of traveling to see where photography was going on. And he knew that there was some . . . there was another person, too, that was very . . . he was very close to Steichen. That was Wayne Miller. And so Wayne Miller was in Chicago, too. So he’d come and see Wayne Miller and see me. In fact, he might have come through for me while being with Wayne Miller, because Wayne Miller worked with him in the Navy.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, what kind of result did you see once you had your first shows at the Museum of Modern Art? Did you suddenly become much more widely known?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. I got known through Steichen. I’m pretty sure of that. I don’t know . . . no, I don’t think suddenly. I mean that in In and Out of Focus I only had . . . only had a few pictures — about five or six, I think. But it was a huge show. But it did turn out that they went to Germany and I got an award from — I guess it may be in there [in the resume--Ed.] — I got an award from it.

ROBERT BROWN: Oh, for the . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah, the plaque and diploma. [laughs]

ROBERT BROWN: But at this time there were certain people who might be beginning to collect your prints?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: I don’t think so. I had a little show in Chicago, in a little tiny gallery there, and I sold four prints, I think. But I was only selling them for five dollars apiece. [laughs]

ROBERT BROWN: So you weren’t likely to . . . ?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No, get rich. [laughs]

ROBERT BROWN: Or know who bought them . . .

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No, no, that’s right.

ROBERT BROWN: . . . or care.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: [laughs] Yeah, that . . . .

[INTERRUPTION IN TAPING]

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: No, but photography was . . . . You were a dope if you did photography. There were very few people that liked photography. So it’s right that at the moment it’s the opposite. There’s good people who like photography. I feel funny about people thinking it’s good.

ROBERT BROWN: It’s accepted.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. [laughs] It seems like something’s wrong.

ROBERT BROWN: You met Aaron Siskind in the late Forties, I guess?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, he came through Todd Webb. He first knew Aaron in New York, and . . . Aaron was on a sabbatical, I think, because he taught . . . .

ROBERT BROWN: Yeah, he was teaching in New York City, right?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah. And so he was going to go West, and so Todd told him to stop and see me and Arthur Siegel. So that’s how we first got to know each other. He came to the school.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you find you had a lot in common, or what? Did he become especially congenial?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Oh, yeah. He is a very sensitive guy. He liked my photographs. And I realized that he was in there, too, and so . . . that’s why I wanted him to come to the school after I got to know . . . after I’d known him. I just actually just talked to him one day, and I knew that I wanted him because he would have filled a part we needed real bad there at the school.

ROBERT BROWN: Which was what?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Well, he had done projects with people in the Photo League in New York City and this is what . . . I mean, if you do something like that, you can deal with it in terms of students. Well, that would be useful in earning a living.

ROBERT BROWN: Sure.

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Because if they, you know, deal with doing a documentary in the street, documenting the street, or a place or something, and he could discuss that kind of thing. And then he was a art photographer, and that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want a commercial photographer.

ROBERT BROWN: You didn’t want someone who just had one talent?

HARRY M. CALLAHAN: Yeah.

ASX CHANNEL: Harry Callahan