In 1956, renowned American photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999) was directing the photography department at the Institute of Design in Chicago when he received a Graham Foundation grant to pursue a project of his choice. Initially considering using the funds for work in northern Michigan, Callahan instead took a sabbatical year and, on the advice of Edward Steichen, traveled to Europe with his wife Eleanor and their 7-year-old daughter Barbara.
After spending two months in Germany, the family settled in Aix-en-Provence from September 1957 to July 1958. This marked a complete change of scenery for Callahan, who had never left the northern United States before. Despite discovering Europe and the 'picturesque' charm of this small French town for the first time—his own words—Callahan's images from Aix-en-Provence display the same rigor and aesthetic concerns as his previous work in Chicago and the American Midwest.
Callahan's European work maintained his characteristic focus on urban environments and architecture, street photography featuring fleeting feminine silhouettes, his minimalist approach to nature, and of course, the constant presence of Eleanor, his wife. Transitioning from an American metropolis and the vast territories of Michigan and Wisconsin to a small city in southern France, Callahan continued to revisit his work and perfect his graphic obsessions. He maintained his routine of photographing in the morning and dedicating his afternoons to darkroom work, as he had always done.
Rather than focusing on Aix-en-Provence's rich architecture or historical heritage, Callahan found in its streets—sunny even in winter—the ideal theater for his research into shadow and light and the graphic qualities of ordinary facades. From the Cours Mirabeau, a vast esplanade lined with 18th-century mansions, adorned with rich fountains and plane trees, he captured only tiny figures emerging from intense, deep black. His images from Aix-en-Provence represent one of the rare cases where a master of American street photography confronted the setting of a small European town in the 1950s, with its narrow streets and modest shops, while maintaining a certain distance from the city's inhabitants.
The French Archives exude a cold, distanced poetry without any nostalgia. Some of his nature studies were created in the garden of the house he occupied on the road to Montagne Sainte-Victoire, beloved by Cézanne. There, Callahan pursued his minimalist approach to landscape, favoring tight compositions and extending his experimental and formal research. Having taught at Chicago's Institute of Design, an offshoot of Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus where he had been hired in 1946, Callahan fully utilized the resources of the photographic medium to translate his own sensations.
While Callahan had previously created double exposures, the symbiosis between Provence's landscapes and Eleanor's body became a true revelation for him, and he devoted himself to creating multiple variations on this theme. When asked about these images, Harry Callahan responded that every time he looked at the landscape, he thought of Eleanor. In rare interviews, Callahan confided how his stay in Aix-en-Provence with his wife and daughter was a moment of absolute fulfillment and pleasure. About this trip, his first abroad, he declared: 'I just know that somehow Europe had a decisive influence on me.'
Seduced by the project of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, whose construction site he discovered in 1994, Callahan revisited his personal archives alongside his friend and gallerist Peter MacGill. He selected 130 original prints, most previously unpublished, under the name 'French Archives' to donate the entire collection to the museum. This initial gesture of support and confidence from a great American photographer undoubtedly marked an important milestone in building the MEP's collection. The Harry Callahan French Archives exhibition, featuring work from Aix-en-Provence 1957-1958, ran until January 29, 2017, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, with an accompanying catalog published by Actes Sud.
