Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and others defined the dominant aesthetic of modern American photography of the 1920s. The formal rigor and precision of their pictures set forth an ideal of purity and contemplation, unsullied by the complexities of the modern world. It was their acute alertness to subtle particulars that saved their work from lifeless perfection.
Beginning in the early 1940s, and for nearly half a century thereafter, Callahan extended the tradition by intensifying both of its poles. His pictures mark an extreme of austerity, but they are full of variety and playful experiment. Like snowflakes, they adhere to a rigid set of rules, but no two are the same.
Here Callahan’s view of the shore of Lake Michigan reduces photography’s unbroken scale of tones to the unsullied white of the snow, the pure black of the trees, and a middle gray. Yet the distinction between water and sky is there—just barely. And while the tree trunks make strong vertical accents, they vary in thickness and shape, and they group themselves into pairs, like three figures poised for action. As the trunks branch and branch again, they form a tapestry: flattened, whole, and unbroken, but delicate and inexhaustibly intricate.
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
