McDermott - Style

Harry Callahan

Harry Callahan is a professional photographer who is most known for his words of pristine
depictions of nature. With Adam Ansel as a mentor, he too fell in love with the seemingly
divineness of the natural world around us. Though he is not religious he has said on many
account that photography fills a spiritual need inside him and capturing a plant in perfect
detail and eloquence is a way for him to feel fulfilled. His images are often high contrast,
either white or black, smooth or rough and they don't force a perspective or opinion on the
viewer just an image of nature. He shoots in film and uses a 9x12cm Linhof Technika and a
8x10 Deardorff large-format camera. Many of his works are of a single plant or a single
object but are taken in such detail and are developed in such a high contrast it causes the
view to look at the image differently. His other works are images are sometimes square or
rectangular photos of a clump of nature from various US states. He most likely uses an
aperture greater than or equal to f22 to get the detail in all corners of his photo. He also loves
to experiment in the darkroom when developing his images often double exposing. His
work, though inspired by Ansel Adams, is something different that truly reflects his artistic
process. When I started this project I did not want to emulate Harry Callahan’s work at all. I
had my sights set on a different style of photographing I wanted to do. Unfortunately my
model fell through and I had to do something else. So I went outside and tried to emulate
Callahan's style. This proved to be much harder than I thought it would. When you look at
Callahan's photos you see a single shot of something seemingly insignificant but when I was
reading the book Elemental Landscapes that features his photographs I noted the author
wrote that described the hidden complexity of his photos. Each one reduces the world to a
small slice. It is meant to heighten the viewers perception of what remains and often in the
absence of a subject, they offer the complete fullness of a plot of ground or sky. Although
Callahan had the option to use color for his photos I think he chose to use black and white
because it strips the photo down to the bare essence. Viewers aren’t distracted by bright
colors but are more focused on what is depicted and how it interacts in the small frame of a
camera. I had some trouble with this when editing the photos I took some I really liked but
when I turned them to black and white it looked plain terrible and it was definitely a challenge
to find scenes that would look good in black and white.