eleanor callahan

One of the greatest muses in photo history, Eleanor Callahan, died last week at the age of ninety-five. Harry Callahan photographed his wife for more than fifty years. From intimate nudes to double exposures of her silhouette projected onto the woods, her image acted as an anchor in Callahan’s vision.

The obituary in the NYT noted that the collaborative work “ranks with Alfred Stieglitz’s of Georgia O’Keeffe.”

It went on to say: “With her raven hair and ripe figure, Eleanor Callahan is one of the most recognizable models in the history of 20th-century photography, an inseparable part of both the life and work of one of its most renowned artists. Clothed and standing among trees in a public park, or nude and turned to the wall while clutching a radiator in an empty room, she served as a formal element within Mr. Callahan’s austere compositions as well as a symbol of womanhood. From 1941 to his death in 1999, she allowed herself to be photographed by him, without complaint, hundreds of times.”

About modeling for her husband, Eleanor had this to say: ““He just liked to take the pictures of me. In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”

The Callahans were married for 63 years. “And they were, I’d say, all nice ones,” Mrs. Callahan said in an interview with curator Julian Cox. “We never had any real fights.”

The trust and interdependence between them has been chronicled in several exhibitions, most recently in “Harry Callahan: Eleanor,” which opened in 2007 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; and in “Harry Callahan at 100,” the retrospective now at the National Gallery in Washington.

Here are some of my favorite pictures Harry Callahan made of his beautiful wife Eleanor.