Harry Callahan: Gender, Genre, and Street Photography (2007)

Starting with a close examination of the work and reputation of Harry Callahan, Solomon-Godeau presents a critical and alternative history of street photography. She explores how and why photographing people unawares on the street became legitimized and elaborated as a genre unique to the medium of photography while rejecting the broader category. Using Callahan’s photographs, she suggests other meanings within such work that exceed its nominal subject matter, conscious authorial intention, or modernist aesthetics. Among these are the gendered attributes of public space and the psychosexual dynamics at work in male photographers’ clandestine looks at the (unaware) female pedestrian. Solomon-Godeau seeks to understand the logic of inclusion and exclusion that generates a genre and thus suggests that no matter how “abstract” Callahan’s work, it remains always and already embedded in social and political circuits of mastery, desire, fear, and control.