Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
When I’m working well, I can make a lot of pictures at one time—three or four, each one as good as the next. Then I can go for a year without making one good exposure.
I just don’t know what makes a picture, really—the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it’s beautiful and another one can write it and it’s dead. What the difference is, I don’t know.
I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor but I believe they develop my seeing and help later on in other photos.
It takes me a long time to change. I don’t think you can just go out and figure out a bunch of visual ideas and photograph. The change happens in living and not through thinking.
A photo is able to capture a moment that people can’t always see. Wanting to see more makes you grow as a person and growing makes you want to show more of life around you.
I thought at one time I should benefit humanity, but I don’t even know what that means anymore, and then you think, well, you’re doing it to satisfy yourself, but there’s more to yourself than just satisfying yourself too, and so I really think that it’s just that I want to leave something for somebody.
The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different, but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself. I realize that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves.
Everything was Bauhaus this and Bauhaus that. I wanted to break it... I got tired of experimentation. I got sick of the solarization and reticulation and walked-on negatives. What I was interested in was the technique of seeing... I introduced problems like “evidence of man,” and talking to people—making portraits on the street... I thought [the students] should enter into dealings with human beings and leave abstract photography. I felt that social photography would be the next concern.
