Eleanor, Port Huron

WALL LABEL: Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography, 2016

With her dark hair and ripe figure, Eleanor Callahan is one of the most recognisable models in twentieth-century photography. The wife and muse of Harry Callahan, she was photographed repeatedly by him over their sixty-three years of marriage – nude and clothed, indoors and outdoors, in public parks and city streets, at the beach, in a tent, in the woods, among sand dunes, in the waters of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, and in the privacy of the family home. This photograph was taken at Port Huron, where they holidayed every summer.

Harry Callahan and Eleanor Knapp met on a blind date in 1933, when they both worked for Chrysler in Detroit. He was twenty-one, she was seventeen. They were married three years later. Eleanor supported Harry both emotionally and financially in his artistic pursuits and, as she explained in an interview in 2008:

He just liked to take pictures of me. In every pose. And whatever I was doing. And I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.

Julie Robinson, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs