To be a photographer, one must photograph.
No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures.
Experience is the best teacher of all.
And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist.
Only the journey matters.

- Harry Callahan
 

I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself
and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing.
To me, that makes photography more exciting.

- Harry Callahan again
 

Harry Callahan: Chicago 1950 © Estate of Harry Callahan

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

- Claes Oldenburg
 

The work of most artists clearly aims at extrapolating from their personal experience, to make it the vessel for a broader and more universal statement.  Such work invites us to work our way outward, from the private and specific to the larger world.  Harry Callahan's work is an exception, for it draws us ever more insistently inward toward the centre of Callahan's private sensibility.  This sensibility is expressed in his perception of subject matter that is remarkably personal and restricted in its range.  For 30 years Callahan photographed his wife and child, the streets of the cities in which he lived, and details of the pastoral landscapes into which he periodically escaped - materials so close at hand, so universally and obviously accessible, that one might have supposed that a dedicated photographer could exhaust their potential in a fraction of that time.  Yet Callahan repeatedly made these simple experiences new again by virtue of the precision of his feeling.

The point is not merely that Callahan has responded faithfully as a photographer to the quality of his own life, or merely, even, that photography has been his method of focusing the meaning of that life.  The point is that for Harry Callahan photography has been a way of living - his way of meeting and making peace with the day.

Source: members.shaw.ca photo; masters-of-photography.com text

In Similar Veins

Source: trinixy.ru "Silent World" by Michael Kenna

I might even like the one above even better than Callahan's...

"The Gates" in snow

Source: joesnyc.streetnine.com/archives/central_park Photos of New York City and occasionally elsewhere by Joseph O Holmes.

See today's photo (joesnyc.streetnine.com) or about (joesnyc.streetnine.com/about.html) for his personal favourites.

Novel Marriage of Photography and Art...

Source: Veruschka, for Playboy, 1971

Camouflage

Source: thesun.co.uk sent in by Salma Rodriguez

Another Brick in the Wall

Source: thesun.co.uk sent to them by Julie Appleton

Unfortunately, I don't know the artist's name for most of the works above...

For photos of the earth and moon, stained glass, sunsets on Wellington Harbour, Lady Fair, Civic Square, the old mill, the Whippany River, historical houses, Lake Parsippany and more clicking the "Up" button below takes you to the Index page for this Photographs section.