Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
Photography is filled with conflicts and choices. I can be just as serious about one picture as I am about another, but one works and the other doesn’t. Why? Ultimately I choose... that’s the important one... and give up on the other.
I very rarely start photographing immediately. I like to walk and walk and walk. And the beach was nice because I can walk and unwind and then after a while start photographing. You can go to the sea where it’s beautiful and you are a part of it and I guess you want to let somebody else know about it. I think I must have felt the same way with Eleanor.
I wanted something important, something spiritual in my life. And as these feelings developed, I found that my spiritual enrichment came through art. It was then that I realized that I wanted to be an artist. That’s it. You see, I learn slowly, but every day I seem to learn more.
Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life. 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. I want to discover and establish them through photography.
I am interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it.
I have ideas. I always go out with an idea, but it isn’t a very big deal, you know. It isn’t as if I’m going to save the world. Maybe I want to get down low and tilt the front lens, maybe it’s that much.
My value lies in the fact that I am a man for whom the visible world exists.
