HARRY CALLAHAN
Aix-en-Provence 1958
atlanta, georgia
hands: harry callahan, 2.10.94

“In 1956 I received a $10,000 grant from the Graham Foundation. It was really meant for architects, but none of them could leave their practice and take a year off. I took all my gear and went to Aix-en-Provence,” says Harry Callahan, describing his leave of absence from teaching at the Institute of Design in Chicago.

Callahan took his family along. “We had this unbelievably wonderful place to live in France. [It had] a gardener and his wife and mother, and they sort of adopted us. Everything was so picturesque it seemed you couldn’t take a picture.”

Even so, one day he photographed a stalk of grass in a vase in the dining room. When making a print of the picture, Callahan exposes the negative long enough for the room’s shadowy presence to disappear to black—as he had planned it would.

“In 1976 the Center for Creative Photography bought all my negatives. They agreed to pay $10,000 a year for ten years, but the negatives don’t go there until after my death,” says Callahan. “Two collectors in New York paid the same amount for vintage prints, which meant I could stop teaching for good, which was great! Still, when Tucson bought the negatives, it nearly killed me. You know—you see—the negative is all I have.”