Harry Callahan at 100

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through March 4

Harry Callahan’s photographs are “remarkably timeless,” said Mara Hoberman in Artforum. Though he created many of his most striking images during an era when his cityscapes featured women in gloves and men in dress hats, he constantly “toggled between realism and abstraction” in a way that has prevented the work from becoming dated. Callahan, who would have been 100 this year, first picked up a camera in his mid-20s, while working for General Motors in his native Detroit. For the next six decades, this self-taught master experimented with the effects he could create whether training his lens on nature, on America’s cities, or on his wife and daughter. “The heart and soul” of this retrospective, in fact, are the portraits of his wife and unfailing muse, Eleanor. In images both posed and candid, shot in single or multiple exposures, Callahan managed to capture “not only his wife’s likeness but her spiritual essence.”

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Callahan’s brilliance eventually faded, said Louis Jacobson in the Washington City Paper. By mounting this retrospective largely chronologically, the National Gallery has “inadvertently” underscored a truism: that “it’s really, really hard to keep creativity going indefinitely.” But there’s no need to dwell on his uninspiring later images of houses in Providence or pedestrians in distant locales. The young Callahan could work magic with “the humblest of subjects”: Eleanor’s pale back, grass sprouting through snow, “the shadowy forms of bollards and bird paths in a snowy park.” One image from the ’40s was made by simply capturing the patterns traced out by a flashlight in a dark room. Yet the result, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post, is a “breathtaking” work of abstraction. Across “centuries of representational imagery,” no one before had shown the world anything like it.