In the 1970s, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan wrested photography into a deeply personal medium, using the camera to explore emotion and the possibility of transcendence.
Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan is a sprawling survey of works by the mid-twentieth-century American photographers on view at Princeton University Art Museum. With painstaking research and judicious selections from the museum’s own holdings, curator Brendan Fay charts the fruitful confluences of White’s, Siskind’s, and Callahan’s careers in the 1940s through ’70s. The assemblages of prints, slides, and archival publications track the three photographers from camera-club and documentary roots to influential tenures as the first generation of photography program directors in colleges across the United States. In bringing their works together in dialogue, Fay illustrates how White, Siskind, Callahan—each in his own way and as a spiritual collective—not only elevated photography into a way of making a comfortable living, but as a manifesto for how to be in the world. As fellow travelers, they would shape their medium into a discipline defined by an intentional and introspective way of seeing, that is, one that has a worldview, a morality.
Moving through Photography as a Way of Life, I at first felt the strain of following the progression of three distinct lives and careers. It’s a daunting task for any curator or historian, let alone a viewer. I would be pulled away from my experience of a picture so that I could scan the wall text and attribute the work to the right photographer or make sense of how it fits in the overall tapestry of the project. But where the exhibition thrives is Fay’s choice to contextualize biography and history in the motifs, styles, and techniques that drew White, Siskind, and Callahan together as admirers of each other’s work and frequent collaborators. This gave me a thread to follow for more immersive and rewarding repeat viewings. (The exhibition catalogue copublished with Princeton University Press provides a detailed history of the photographers’ careers and deeper contextualization of their work.)
