I chose Harry Callahan for one simple reason: when I opened his book, my first thought was that he was the photographer I am trying to be.
Harry Callahan was born in 1912 in Detroit and dead in 1999 in Atlanta. He was an autodidact in photography. His work is, in his own words, “a lifetime project”: "I am interested in relating the problems that affect me to some set of values that I am trying to discover and establish as being my life […] through photography”. Thus, his approach of photography was very personal and intimate.
I could have filled the "15 pictures I wish I had taken" article with only Callahan's photos. Because his art is exactly what I wish I was able to do.
Some recurrent themes and motives can be noticed in his work: primarily his wife Eleanor and his daugther Barbara.
He also photographed cities a lot, and to me most of his urban photographs convey a sense of solitude and loneliness.
But Callahan was also interested in nature.
From a formal point of view, Callahan's photos show a strong sense of line and geometry, and light and darkness. Some of his pictures are almost abstract.
He also worked a lot with multiple exposures.
So Callahan did a lot of things. For the emulation project, I chose to adopt a similar approach to pictures: very personal and subjective. I focused primarily on images and themes that obsess me in photography - shadows, elecic wires in the sky, trees, swings... I was particularly careful not to overthink but to take pictures very intuitively.
Style-wise, Formally, I used multiple exposures, and tried to shoot very simple and geometrical images, sometimes almost abstract.
