Harry Callahan, Tate Modern - exhibition review
The influence of America’s great 20th-century photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999) is at last spreading to the UK. This exhibition reveals his remarkable diversity of subjects and compositions and the printing processes from 1940s black and white to the exploding colours of the Seventies. He describes his work as depicting “Nature, Buildings and People”. People refers mostly to his wife, Eleanor, model and muse, portrayed nude and clothed. For the close-up, Eleanor, 1947, he beautifully homogenises her flesh tones but clothed she becomes a distant figure against lyrical woods and snowscapes.
In the Nature room, grasses and leaves are transformed to abstraction, wafting rhythmically, like hair, catching light swirling beams like Cy Twombly paintings. The effect is surprisingly meditative. In contrast, city shots document eras, capturing shop fronts, reflections playing in windows, and the saturated colours and geometric patterns of tower blocks.
Chicago (apples), 1951, predates William Egglestone’s famed colours with the shiny red apples on a glossy red window sill. In contrast, the 1962 portrait of an anonymous naked woman projected onto a tower block is a reminder of the sometimes unsubtle erotic pleasures in Callahan’s work.
Until May 31, 2014 (tate.org.uk, 020 7887 8888)
