Harry Callahan

Alfred Stieglitz

Callahan’s primary subjects were landscapes, city-scapes, and varied, unconventional portraits.

Stieglitz pointed his lens toward the clouds above Lake George, New York. He eventually made more than two hundred photographs in the series he initially called Songs of the Sky and later Equivalents. 

While both photographs are in black and white, Callahan’s image has a harsh contrast between a bright white and a deep black, compared to Stieglitz’s photo, where there is a range of grey scale tones.

Stieglitz attempted to awaken in the viewer the emotional equivalent of his own state of mind at the time he took the picture and to show that the content of a photograph was different from its subject, similar to Callahan who once said “The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem,”  in 1964. “If you choose your subject selectively, intuitively, the camera can write poetry.” Both photographers are implying how you view the image, emotionally, is very different to the subject of the photograph.

Both images are of natural forms in natural day light, both have repetition of the same natural form, Callahan’s being trees and Stieglitz’s clouds.

In Callahan’s photograph, the lighting is the same all over the image, compared to the lighting in Stieglitz’s image, where the clouds naturally create a darker shadow, then they break, letting a burst of bright sunlight enter the captured photograph and reflect against the lens of the camera.