American photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999) created one of his most significant bodies of work during an extended stay in Aix-en-Provence, France, from 1957 to 1958, resulting in what would become known as his "French Archives." The project began in 1956 when Callahan, who was running the photography department at the Institute of Design in Chicago, received a grant from the Graham Foundation to pursue a project of his choice.
Initially considering a trip to Northern Michigan, Callahan instead decided to take a year-long sabbatical and travel to Europe with his wife Eleanor and seven-year-old daughter Barbara, following advice from renowned photographer Edward Steichen. After spending two months in Germany, the family settled in Aix-en-Provence from September 1957 to July 1958, marking Callahan's first venture outside the United States.
The transition from American urban landscapes to a small French village represented a complete culture shock for the photographer who had never left the northern United States. Despite discovering Europe and what he described as the "picturesque" nature of the French village for the first time, Callahan maintained his distinctive aesthetic approach. His photographs from Aix-en-Provence demonstrated the same rigor and artistic concerns that characterized his earlier work in Chicago and the American Midwest.
Callahan's French period showcased his consistent themes: his relationship with urban environments and architecture, street photography featuring fleeting silhouettes often of women, his minimalist approach to nature, and the constant presence of his wife Eleanor as a subject. Moving from American metropolises and the vast expanses of Michigan and Wisconsin to a small city in southern France, Callahan continued to refine his work and perfect his graphic obsessions while maintaining his disciplined routine of photographing in the morning and working in the darkroom during afternoons.
Rather than focusing on Aix-en-Provence's rich historical architecture and heritage, Callahan found inspiration in the city's streets, which remained sunny even in winter, providing an ideal setting for his studies of shadow and light and the graphics of ordinary facades. From the famous Cours Mirabeau, a grand promenade lined with 18th-century hotels, ornate fountains, and plane trees, he captured only tiny figures emerging from intense, deep black shadows.
The images Callahan created in Aix-en-Provence represent a rare case study of a master of American street photography from the 1950s confronting the setting of a small European village with its narrow streets and modest shops. He maintained a certain distance from the city's inhabitants, creating what critics described as "cold and distanced poetry without any nostalgia" from his French archives.
For his nature studies, some photographs were taken in the garden of the house where he stayed on the route to Sainte-Victoire Mountain, famously painted by Cézanne. There, Callahan pursued his minimalist landscape approach, favoring tighter compositions and extending his experimental and formal research. Teaching at the Institute of Design in Chicago, which was a manifestation of the New Bauhaus established by László Moholy-Nagy who hired him in 1946, Callahan fully utilized photographic resources to translate his personal feelings.
While Callahan had previously experimented with double exposures, the combination of Provence's landscapes with Eleanor's body became a revelation, inspiring him to create multiple variations of these composite images. When asked about his photographs, Callahan revealed that "each time I looked at the landscape, I thought of Eleanor," demonstrating the deep personal connection between his artistic vision and his relationship with his wife.
In rare interviews, Callahan expressed how his stay in Aix-en-Provence with his wife and daughter represented "a moment of plenitude and absolute pleasure." Reflecting on this first international trip, he stated, "I just know that, in one way or another, Europe had a key influence on me," acknowledging the transformative impact of his French experience on his artistic development.
The significance of Callahan's French work was recognized decades later when he became involved with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris. Seduced by the museum project, which he discovered during construction in 1994, Callahan collaborated with his friend and gallerist Peter MacGill to revisit his personal archives. Together, they selected 130 original prints, most of which were previously unpublished, to donate to the museum under the title "French Archives."
This generous donation marked a pivotal moment for the MEP, representing the first gesture of trust and support from a major American photographer and undeniably establishing an important foundation for the museum's collection. The Harry Callahan French Archives exhibition, featuring work from Aix-en-Provence 1957-1958, was displayed at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie through January 29, 2017, with an accompanying exhibition catalogue published by Actes Sud.
