These pictures also provide a welcome counterweight within Callahan's body of work. There's an inherent austerity to his art which Eleanor's presence within a frame compensates for. Even so, there's a slightly drained quality to these pictures, an absence of exaltation. They suggest totality rather than intensity: a sense that no one else in the world exists other than these two people (or three, when Callahan photographed Eleanor with their daughter, Barbara). "It becomes just another part of your day," Eleanor said of posing so much for her husband; "It was a very natural thing to do."
That naturalness created an otherness. At what point of accumulation does a body of images take on a life of its own? "When I look back on those photographs," Eleanor has said, "I don't see them as myself. I see them as very beautiful pictures, but I don't think, 'That's me.' . . . They are something separate from me."
That separateness is fitting. Form always interested Callahan more than feeling did. So much of the success of the Eleanor pictures lies in how he could simply take feeling for granted and concentrate on form. Despite their consistent understatement, there is at least one thing patently lavish about the Eleanor pictures: the love in them.
Callahan's photographs of his wife are a vast theme and variations. She's the theme, and he provides the variations: Eleanor nude, clothed, in close-up, in the distance, in the city, in the country, in the water, with their daughter, and on and on. The effect is one of constant, low-key exploration. Clearly, Callahan never tired of Eleanor - or the joining of his eye and her appearance. Nor do we.
They met on a blind date, in Detroit, in 1933. Their marriage lasted 63 years, until his death, in 1999. Now living in Atlanta, Eleanor came to RISD to see the show earlier this month.
