Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago

Callahan's wife, Eleanor Knapp, was one of his most frequent subjects and a constant source of creative inspiration. Callahan sought, in his work, to combine his own lived experience of daily life with a formal analysis of line and light. Between the years of 1947 and 1957, he restlessly photographed both his wife and their daughter, Barbara, to produce photographs that were both personal and visually poetic. When photographing Eleanor and Barbara, he would meticulously arrange their figures to accentuate the particular lighting effects that he was interested in capturing.