I Am a Camera: Three Historic Photographers

(Princeton University Press.)

“I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, just recording not thinking. Recording. Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, and fixed.”

--Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories

“A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. All things are photographable.”

--Garry Winogrand

How sweet it is! When your three favourite modernist photographers get the huge exhibition and publication acclaim they all deserved separately but which is all the more illuminating and meaningful if read, studied, viewed and reviewed as an ensemble, as a hugely important creative constellation of innovative artists. Such is the joy that arrives spontaneously when one picks up this highly significant exhibition catalogue (artfully disguised as a gorgeously designed coffee table art book), Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, published by Princeton University Press in conjunction with the Princeton University Art Museum. It is a well-earned testament to the achievements of three titans who literally defined the terms by which all photographers after them would be assessed. And the astute author/curator Brendan Fay is the ideal candidate for such a monumental undertaking: his eye and mind will help any reader or viewer, whether they are familiar with these artists or just seeing them for the very first time, come to a fulsome appreciation for what makes these photographic giants... well, so gigantic. White (1908-1976), Siskind (1903-1991) and Callahan (1912-1999), are exemplars of a certain kind of quiet seeing: an intimate and reverential attention to detail and ambience which they share in an elegant and austere manner. I often refer to them as the Vermeers of photography, and Fay’s book confirms it.

A short time ago, I was observing the artists exhibiting at the recent photography show at New York’s iconic Park Avenue Armory, which was staged by the Association of Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), and it struck me that almost every single one of the entrants, many of them contemporary exponents and relatively young or mid-career, had been profoundly influenced by one or all three of the classic figures being explored in the Princeton exhibition Fay organized and foregrounded in the superb book that accompanies it. This is precisely as it should be, through it’s debatable whether or not the younger photo-artists were aware of the stylistic overlaps between their current work and the lexicons established by their elders starting roughly in the 1940’s. A profound aesthetic vibe overlapped the postmodern photographers and White, Siskind and Callahan, who were similarly inspired, to varying degrees, by the creative generations preceding their own breakthroughs and represented by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Walker Evans.

The Armory Show had the catchy title What Makes a Photograph a Photograph, and that notion too, perhaps even unconsciously, was a pivotal question, largely rhetorical, always being asked by White, Siskind and Callahan. It was answered by those who followed in their tracks: Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. The stylistic and intellectual continuum at work here is a splendid one indeed, and it follows organically with photography’s own evolution out of the image-making tradition of painting, which in turn evolves thematically into the realm of cinema. Both photography and cinema are the natural outcomes of the history of visual art embedded in painting, which since it had its origins in an age thousands of years older than the relatively new technology of the camera (which was only about 100 years old by 1940, when these three masters were emerging), was always a challenging act to follow via mechanical means of reproduction.

By now, however, not only art historians, critics, curators and collectors are fully aware of photography’s accepted role as a kind of culmination of formal art history, with its own rapidly accelerated system of signs; so are members of the viewing public (or at least those who have been paying attention). I was struck by an observation by Lydia Johnson, Director of AIPAD, to the effect that photography has the power to question history, shape identity and inspire new ways of seeing. That is precisely the insight, as well as the question of what makes a photograph a photograph, that White, Siskind and Callahan first asked and answered in the groundbreaking works Fay has assembled in this exhibition and catalogue. Their shared answer, which was first fully articulated by my personal favourite of the three, Minor White, was used as the title for one of his colour images (which Fay has selected for the cover of this book): Photography As a Way of Life. In each case, and in a manner that echoed Christopher Isherwood’s epigram above, the three featured artists who turned themselves into embodied cameras, not just metaphorically but also literally. And it was White who for me went the furthest into the interior of what a photograph is and does, via what he called his equivalence theory. According to him, the “equivalence” in question (which one might also call a resonance) connects the photograph to the viewer by means of recognition, an emotional response that might be akin to empathy.

Minor White, Portland (1964).

In his 1963 essay “The Perennial Trend” White further asserted that “this equivalence is the backbone of photography as a means of expression and creation,” an insight which most astute readers/viewers will immediately understand as already present and operating for earlier epochs in classical painting modes. It’s the key manner in which all image-signs have significance, regardless of whether they are realistic, romantic or abstract in their modes of making. “When a photographer presents us with what to him is an equivalent,” White explained,

he is telling us in effect, I had a feeling about something and here is my metaphor for that feeling. What really happened was that he recognized a series of forms which, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct their viewer into a specific known feeling state, or place within himself. The meaning appears in the feelings they raise in the beholder, a feeling state created by both the photographer and the personality of the individual viewer.

That quite prescient insight into the nature of an interactive art practice allowing every viewer to see a slightly different image, despite looking at the same photograph, is the most useful tool for appreciating the mutual accomplishments of all three of these masters. They each invite us to enter into the images they create, in a somewhat contemplative manner, which in turn renders the meaning of the work singularly palpable, and thus unique. If art is as much in the mind and spirit as it is in the eyes, as has been suggested by many, it stands to reason then that any truly in-depth study of art, including and perhaps especially photography, will of necessity be inherently psychological in nature. And thus this exhibition and catalogue book fully provide an in-depth study of the psychology of seeing, as embodied by three aesthetic visionaries. James Steward, the Director of the Princeton Art Museum, characterized this important show succinctly: “Photography as a Way of Life highlights a historical moment when photography emerged as a serious academic discipline and a viable artistic profession, and thus as a way of being and living. White, Siskind and Callahan did more that make extraordinary photographs, they built institutions, communities and ideas that continue to shape how photography is taught and valued today.”

The exhibition’s title is taken from a recurring phrase in White’s dairies and letters, in which he described the medium as a way of life that for him as well as Siskind and Callahan encompassed artistic ambition as well as pedagogy and personal growth, a combined thrust that he emphasized as the founding editor of Aperture, the vital magazine he launched in 1952. Meanwhile, for Brendan Fay, there was a personal pleasure and rare professional opportunity in this show, as “Princeton University holds a central place in the academic study of photography, with a proud legacy of stewardship and landmark scholarly exhibitions. The Minor White Archive is one of the cornerstones of that legacy.” In addition to the donation of White’s private archive and notes along with a large number of works, Princeton also has the rare benefit of extensive holdings of both Siskind and Callahan’s images, making the installation and documentation of it a triple bonanza for those of us who revere these artists.

Aaron Siskind, Rome (1967).

Fay, the former Director in the School of Library Sciences at the University of Mississippi, is presently Associate Professor at Eastern Michigan University and shares his perspective:

From the 1940’s through the 1970’s, amid booming markets for both snapshots and photojournalism, photography began to take root within higher education. White, Siskind and Callahan were among the first generation of college-led photography teachers, developing models of photographic education during the GI Bill era that quickly spread across the United States. While achieving critical success through books, exhibitions and museum acquisitions, these artists also helped catalyze the creation of academic programs, publishing ventures and professional societies that defined the postwar photographic landscape.

As such, both the exhibition and book trace how these influential teachers and theorists reimagined the medium itself as both a livelihood and a life’s work.

Despite its gorgeous design, this catalogue is far from a mere pretty picture book: it presents for the first time multiple image montage spreads containing rare archival materials, along with diverse and captivating content culled from popular photography journals of the era. Fay’s informative text expands our appreciation for the splendid images, which in themselves as works of art are superb explorations of the psychology of perception and the poetic nature of the photographic metaphor, while also investigating the subtle structuralist relationships between the signifier and the signified.

If photography is indeed a way of life, it might also be possible to appreciate the seduction of taking pictures, whether or not they are ever even printed, as per Isherwood’s tantalizing notion of recording experience for later (potential) use. A good example of such a distinction might be the compulsively shot work of Garry Winogrand, a later acolyte of the three seminal figures featured here. At the time of his passing in 1984 at only 56 years of age, he had a voluminous archive of 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and some 3,000 rolls that only materialized as contact sheets. Not only were they never seen, exhibited or printed in books or magazines, but they simply never saw the light of day at all. And yet they still existed, all living a silent life in their own separate dimension. White, a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, once jokingly remarked, “Sure, Ansel Adams may have invented the zone system [a photographic method for controlling exposure and development by breaking down a scene into eleven zones of tones from pure black to pure white] but I invented the Zen system [maintaining a state of meditative absorption by focusing on the absence of a self],” so he might also have appreciated Winogrand’s unseen domain of dark images.

Of his own mentors, White also, more seriously, once observed: “Stieglitz, Weston and Ansel all gave me exactly what I needed at the time. I took one thing from each: technique from Ansel, the love of nature from Weston, and from Stieglitz the affirmation that I was alive and could photograph.” It strikes me that this superb Princeton exhibition and book demonstrate that those same three things have been gifted to today’s photographers, whether they realize it or not, by the historic work of White, Siskind and Callahan. Of these three, in terms of contemporary stylistic resonance, it’s logical to think that Callahan was one of the most canonical figures in both fine art and photography as an art form in the 20th century. To be a part of a canon, as Callahan is, or even to initiate one, as White and Siskind did, means that you occupy a special place in the cultural stratosphere, a location which requires everyone after you to be placed in a contextual relationship to you and your work. There is a canon in every medium, be it literature, painting, dance or photography. There are also a classical, a romantic and a modernist canon, with, say, Caravaggio, Turner and Hopper, to name only a few, as part of the hierarchy of painting. Just as clearly, photography has its own historical epochs and a similar aesthetic canon, in which I would comfortably assert that Callahan’s eye was to photography what the great painter of solitude Edward Hopper’s was to the canvas.

Callahan, who at one stage spent seventeen years photographing his wife Eleanor in a series of mesmerizing portraits, was captivated by what has been called the lived experience and practiced what could be considered a phenomenology of the photographic image: the real and ideal are identical. He was also what I would call a radical conformist. By this I mean that, like certain jazz musicians he took a myriad of traditions and extended them so far in the direction they were already headed that he morphed into an experimental artist. Yet in multiple traditions his roots overlapped profoundly at their edges as he swooped past their borders and limits, playing with his powers as only great artists know how to be playful. Callahan would always remain a pictorial master but he ended up shadow boxing with a kind of alert abstraction that merged an elegant impressionist eye with a tough-minded modernist gaze. At first glance, his deceptively simple and casually captured images might appear to be sedately traditional and classical compositions... but they are not. He was one of the most radical and revolutionary photographic artists of the last century, and perhaps of this one too.

Harry Callahan, Chicago Street (1948).

Harry Callahan, Atlanta Street (1984).

Even more pertinent to the persistence of aesthetic limits, Callahan was at heart a revolutionary artist pummeling tradition. He was also, to some extent, America personified. Not the way, say, Walker Evans (nine years his senior) was, since the difference between their approaches to America’s unconscious was both subtle and strong, but it nonetheless captured an uncertain essence and captivated a tumultuous time. Yet he was also the best of Europe remembered. The great expatriate Bauhaus master Lazlo Moholy-Nagy invited Callahan to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1946, where he would remain until 1961, leaving a lasting imprint on the minds of upcoming generations of photographic artists. He went on to found the photography department of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, making an indelible impact on yet another wave of up-and-coming camera artists, many of whom became among the most influential and respected faculty members at universities across North America. As a constant photographer of the street as a subject and theme, Callahan didn’t just see the future; he was already living in it, in our present.

One of the insights that photography historian John Pultz made in his essay “Harry Callahan’s Modernist Photography and the Street in the Cold War Era” is salient here:

The street – the thoroughfares that provide pedestrians with access to the urban core while diving the urban landscape into parcels – played an enduring role in the career of Harry Callahan. While Callahan employed the street as a subject, he approached it in an entirely distinct way. We might think that Callahan’s pictures provide us with a history of streets themselves, however despite their basis in the observable world, Callahan’s street photographs were never meant to be documents of a pre-existing truth. I suggest that they are instead illusory meta-fictions that straddle the line between truth and fiction – they create an imaginary realm out of the apparent stuff of everyday life through a medium that was, at least at that time, seen to be closely aligned to truth. Catching a vanishing way of life, they now evoke nostalgia for an earlier time. Could Callahan have sensed the fugitive nature of this specific form of city life? Could it be that he somehow knew what was to become of his beloved cities?

This new book presents, among many other things, a cogent and revealing urban map leading directly from Callahan to Winogrand. Enjoy your road trip. Minor White has already packed all the equipment you’ll ever need to arrive safely in the future.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.