"This book focuses on Harry Callahan (1912-1999) through his work - both his day-to-day photographic explorations and his resulting sixty-year career as an artist. Drawing upon the rich contents of the Harry Callahan Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, the authors look at how Callahan expressed his visual ideas through deliberate and improvisational processes, and how such processes might be revealed in archival materials such as negatives, transparencies, proof prints, and contact sheets. This close investigation of Callahan's individual and experimental approach to materials in turn leads to a larger consideration of his relationship to seemingly contradictory strains in American visual culture of the twentieth century." "Reproducing a host of previously unpublished images and documents, this volume juxtaposes select artifacts - such as contact sheets and negatives - with final images to explicate Callahan's photographic achievement."--BOOK JACKET.