Harry Callahan

Harry was never comfortable talking about his work. It was torture for him to address an audience, and he rarely did so. It was almost as difficult for him to say much in his own living room, where my fellow graduate students and I met with him every other week to share our photographs. No one would dream of showing up without a respectable amount of work. Nothing was ever said about that; everyone just knew that if you didn’t have work to show every single time, you shouldn’t be in the program in the first place. Harry struggled to make a remark or ask a question of each of us in turn. He would point at a picture and, if he really liked it, he might say, “That’s kinda nifty.” I never heard him flatter anyone or say anything that did not seem entirely sincere, but at the same time I never heard him put anyone down or convey the idea that his opinion mattered more than anyone else’s. If he thought your work was poor, he didn’t bother to say anything.

I didn’t understand Harry at first, because he wasn’t really “teaching” as I understood the term. He never showed anyone how to do anything. (I’m talking about graduate students, although he was apparently excellent with intro classes, where he explained things in simple terms and demonstrated the “how to” stuff clearly.) He certainly never offered advice, nor did he respond in any articulate way or at any length to your work. But eventually I figured it out. Harry’s great strength as a teacher was the power of his example. You learned from Harry that there was no substitute for going out every day and making pictures. It didn’t matter to him what you said or didn’t say. The only thing that counted was whether you were producing work. He knew that most of that work, including his own, would not be good. But the only way you had any chance of producing good pictures was by pouring your energy into the process, day in and day out, editing ruthlessly, and going back again and again and again, out with the camera and into the darkroom. Even that doesn’t guarantee anything. It just improves your chances, and only the truly dedicated are able to keep at it long enough to figure out what they are doing and how to do it better. If you don’t believe in yourself, nothing else matters, and no one can do much to help you.

I taught photography for four decades, and I have always questioned whether it is possible to accomplish anything meaningful in a classroom. If someone doesn’t want to work or doesn’t care, you can’t make them. If they do want to work and if they care deeply, they will find a way, regardless of anything that can be taught in the usual sense of the word. As a student, the best you can hope for is to find someone who affords an example of dedication, passion, and constant, diligent, hard work. And most of us are not prepared to understand those things at 18-21 years of age. But that’s OK. So much of what we learn, we learn in retrospect, not at the time we expect it to happen. The only thing a teacher can really do is to help you become aware of possibility, give you a nudge, help in some indirect way to move you along a path on which you have already begun to travel, even if you are not fully aware of that yet. I think this is what Harry did for me. He went about his work and he expected you to do the same. I have always been grateful to him for that.

2010/2016