Eleanor (No. 35)

For much of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, photographer Harry Callahan's wife, Eleanor, was his most regular subject. She stares out of his acclaimed work, sometimes sharp and sometimes blurred, sometimes Classical and sometimes Modern, in public parks and city streets, at the beach, in a tent, in the studio and their home, nude and clothed, eventually pregnant and then mothering. The couple's longstanding collaboration makes up an intimate visual diary of their relationship and of Callahan's artistic exploration: these are seldom portraits in the traditional sense. More than studies of Eleanor, they are stages in Callahan's lifelong exploration of photography as a creative medium, showing his embrace of an array of materials and techniques, including highly detailed large-format negatives, distortions of movement and focus, silhouettes and multiple exposures. The subject was always Eleanor, but there were always new ways of seeing her.