Exploring Nature With Great Imagination

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The New York Sun

One of the biggest photographic shows in New York City is “Harry Callahan: Nature” at the Pace/MacGill Gallery. It isn’t big because of the number of prints in the exhibition — there are only 12 black and white pictures — and it certainly isn’t big because of their size — the largest are only 8-inches-by-5-inches, and many are considerably smaller. It is big because the talent is big, the ambition is enormous, and the results fill our imaginations with wonder.

Harry Callahan (1912–99) was 26 years old and working in the automobile industry when he first got interested in taking pictures. Three years later, in 1941, he attended a series of lectures Ansel Adams delivered at the Detroit Photo Guild, and the possibilities photography offered for artistic expression opened up before him. He elected to devote himself to photography; he was so talented that by the end of the decade his work had been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

Equally important, László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Moholy-Nagy, a refugee from Hitler, embodied the modernist and experimental culture of the Bauhaus, and Callahan absorbed many of those impulses. After 15 years in Chicago, he went to the Rhode Island School of Design to establish its photography department. One of the consequences of this move is that Providence figures in much of his work. I didn’t know when I was growing up there that it was such an amazing place.

Nature was one of the subjects Callahan was engrossed in over the length of his career. The first picture is “Ansley Park, Atlanta” (1991–92), the last he shot of those in the show, and — as if to make good the Biblical prophecy — the last picture, “Detroit” (1941), is the first. This represents half a century simultaneously exploring nature and exploring photography, discovering ways the medium can render the physical world, and how trees, leaves, blades of grass, crusted snow, and extensive bodies of water can be made into photographs of great beauty.

In spite of its title, “Detroit” is not a cityscape. There is a bit of flooded terrain with weeds and cat-o-nine tails sticking up out of the water, so we see them and their reflections. Beyond the water is a low rise of land along which several lines of telephone poles are arrayed in diminishing progressions to the horizon. The light is bleak, which gives a somber cast to the image. The beauty here is in the precision, the elegance with which the elements are placed in the frame, the way the reflections of the telephone poles in the water blend into the vertical plants growing out of it, the way man’s artifacts complement and are subsumed by nature.

The two 3-inch-by-4-inch images mounted on one mat that make up “Ansley Park, Atlanta” were both shot upward into the overhead branches of trees. In each, big branches coming from the left divide erratically into smaller and smaller branches and twigs, their leaves appearing as shimmering, delicate filigree. There is nothing man-made to provide a sense of scale, so although these are probably large trees, the pictures could be mistaken for microscopic slides, organic but indeterminate. Nature here becomes abstract, the more so because it is seen with such clarity.

“Cape Cod” (1972) is 6-inches-by-7-inches and wants to contain the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. The beach in the foreground is wet and dark from the receding waves. A band of variegated foam tracery floats on the surface of the water; unexceptional small waves recede to the horizon where they meet a low sky of dense clouds. The overall atmosphere of the image is solemn, the texture one of intricate detail. The picture was shot from a considerable height, as if Callahan was airborne, and this perspective, coupled with the diminutive figure of a solitary man walking along the beach, gives it a feeling of cosmic grandeur.

In the last room of the Annie Leibovitz exhibition currently at the Brooklyn Museum there is a black and white picture titled “Monument Valley, Arizona” (1993) that is 93 inches by 137 1/4 inches. To the right of center a mesa rises up above the horizon to a featureless sky. The print is so big that, whatever the condition of the negative, the image appears blurred. I don’t understand the reason for this scale and the blurriness, except that technology makes the size possible and there is a contemporary vogue for out of focus pictures. “Monument Valley” is over 300 times larger than “Cape Cod,” but the latter seems a bigger work because we sense Callahan is trying to come to grips with the awesome extent of nature, while Leibovitz seems merely to be trying to impress us with her artistry.

There are two other photographs titled “Cape Cod” and dated 1972 at Pace/MacGill. They show Callahan’s doggedness and his inventiveness. One is shot from a low angle so that a white expanse of beach takes up the bottom half of the image; the irregular pattern of corrugation gives us a sense of the texture of the sand. To the right there is a very shallow depression in the sand that allows us the slightest glimpse of the sea. The upper half is a blank sky that darkens as it rises from the horizon. Sand, sea, sky: a very simple, very sophisticated image.

The third “Cape Cod” again has beach, a more generous band of ocean this time, and the sky above a distant horizon. But here there is a volleyball net fixed in the sand, a boat beached close to the water, and another boat floating some way out. There are no people in the picture, but they’ll be around when the sun comes out. This is about the shore, and Cape Cod in particular, as a locus of play, recreation, and the human dramas that take place at the marge of the sea. It is about how the sea abides, and how people pass transiently along.

There are no pictures in “Nature” that don’t have something interesting to say about their subject and about the possibilities of photography.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until January 6 (32 E. 57th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-759-7999).


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