Alley, Chicago

Printing multiple times from the same negative, Harry Callahan created a kaleidoscopic vision of a Chicago alley. Pedestrians walk by on spotlit platforms that seem to float in space, while fire escape ladders ascend like scaffolding into the sky. Callahan made this photograph not long after arriving in the city, having accepted an invita-tion from the artist László Moholy-Nagy to teach at the New Bauhaus (now the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology).

Callahan combined Moholy’s emphasis on abstraction and technical innovation with his own view of photography as a means of personal expression. His daily search for revelatory views of Chicago yielded elegant and experimental pictures.