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# Harry Callahan's 1975 Oral History Interview
- URL: https://www.grainpress.com/harry-callahan-1975-oral-history-interview/
- Published: 2026-09-05T15:26:45.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T15:26:45.000Z
- Description: The Archives of American Art has the whole transcript online, free, and Callahan answers most of the questions about his own working method in a sentence or two.
- Author: Grainpress Editors
- Tags: HAVE A LOOK, #fmt-brief

The Archives of American Art holds a tape-recorded interview with Harry Callahan, made on February 13, 1975 in Providence, Rhode Island by Robert Brown, and the [full transcript is online and free to read](https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-harry-m-callahan-11869?ref=grainpress.com). It runs 41 pages from a tape of one hour and 27 minutes.

Callahan was 62 and on sabbatical. He had started the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1961 and taught at Chicago's Institute of Design for fifteen years before that.

He begins in 1938\. A friend had a movie camera; Callahan went to price one, heard what it would cost, and walked out with a still camera instead. He learned to develop and print in a bathroom with what he calls a funny enlarger, joined a camera club in Detroit, and met Todd Webb there.

Then Ansel Adams came to the club to talk and show prints. On a field trip afterward Callahan got him alone with a notebook and asked what lenses, what film, what paper, what developer. "Put it all down and that was my bible for over a year. I wouldn't dare use anything different." He bought an eight-by-ten and contact-printed everything, because a contact print was the sharpest thing he could get.

On printing he is flat about it. "There isn't just one way to print as far as I'm concerned." Contrasty or soft, muddy or dark or light, whatever the picture wants. "I can destroy reality; it doesn't bother me either."

The Archives notes that the recording quality is uneven and that the transcription carries gaps. A PDF of the transcript downloads from the same page.