Artist, Harry M. Callahan: I walk around, all of a sudden, I see something, and then that’s the beginning to start working on something. All the time I’m doing that, I feel like I’m adventuring in some way, looking for something. You don’t know what it’s gonna be.
Curatorial Assistant, Samuel Allen: My name is Samuel Allen. I’m a curatorial assistant in the Department of Photography at MoMA. And that was the artist Harry Callahan.
Callahan was fascinated by building facades. He photographed them frequently. And this is a photograph from 1945 titled New York. It’s basically a grid of grids. It has this geometric composition of windows. The window panes create their own grids, so there is this way in which the image is built around an idea of linearity.
But what makes the photograph compelling, for me, is the deviations from the formal rigidity. You see inside the individual windows, curtains, and blinds. Some of the bricks are worn down. There’s cracks in the facade. They speak to the interior life—some sort of vitality that’s beaming through. And so the careful linear composition seems to create a framework in which suddenly life can emerge. For Callahan, the interest is about the world and the life of things.
Harry M. Callahan: At a certain stage in my life, I felt like I wasn’t doing anything. And I felt, well, you should do something to benefit humanity. When I happened to get started in photography, all of a sudden it did that for me. I wanted to make somebody feel something. I always said that if it moves the spirit and human beings, then that’s what I wanted to do.
Archival audio from: Oral history interview with Harry M. Callahan, 1975 February 13. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.