Author Description

Elemental Landscapes accompanies an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that concentrates exclusively on the landscape photographs of the late American photographer Harry Callahan. The natural landscape was a subject that occupied Callahan throughout his career, and examples range in time from the early 1940s to the early 1990s, providing an in-depth look at the artist's evolution. Callahan was fascinated not by the wide, sweeping landscapes of photographers like Ansel Adams but by more intimate pictures, which often remove the context of earth and sky from the scene, creating abstractions that challenge our notions of landscape by presenting a small slice of the world in all its infinite detail.