 Do you feel lucky punk? All right, we're not looking at that Harry Callaghan today, but Harry Callaghan, the photographer, one of the greatest exponents of seeing photographically, as far as I'm concerned that the world has ever seen, and by looking at his photographs, but understanding why he photographed in the way that he did, and learning to sort of emulate that, we can unlock the key within ourselves to seeing the infinite variety and possibility for photography that surrounds us in the everyday and the mundane. How's it, how's it? If you're not familiar with Harry Callaghan, and quite a few people aren't, let's give you a little background. Like you've probably seen some of his multiple exposure work and this kind of, you know, the painting with light images and what have you, and I dare say that you've also seen some of Eleanor, because that was his very famous subject, and we'll come back to later on. And the reason I've chosen Harry Callaghan today to look at is that he is possibly the best exponent of learning to unpick all the options that are around us for photography and for seeing the world in a more interesting way. And that's kind of why, rather than doing specific exercises, if we start to look at a photographer whose life was an exercise, I think we're gonna learn so much more that you're going to come out of this, understanding more about his photographs and bringing some of that into your own images as well. Harry said that his goal throughout all of his photography was to discover his instinctive visual life. And I think that's the word that we're looking at is learning to recognize the instinct within all of us, within your own way of seeing the world. It is allowing that instinct to surface and influence your photographs. And when you let that happen, it can only improve your images. Amateur photography, or the word amateur, has some negative connotations to it, right? And I don't want to disparage amateurism because most photographers fall into that category and that's perfectly fine. But in this case, what I mean is that when Harry Callaghan picked up a camera, he photographed both with the idea of an amateur, because he was a beginner, and he photographed subjects that are very much in the amateur camp. There are things that we would all naturally turn our camera to as a beginner, the street outside. The people closest to us, our friends, subjects that are around us, not famous people, not amazingly sweeping landscapes and things, just the things that held our attention as beginners. And he stayed true to that aesthetic, if you want to call it, throughout his entire life. And that's why I think his work is so vital to the person who wants to improve their photography, is that when you look at his photographs, everything that he photographs is available to you in some form or another. You don't need to have access to mysterious things. He also wasn't bound by aesthetic rules, if you want to call them that. And I think there's a great quote in this book, I'll just do that, of Harry Callaghan, where they talk about him joining a camera club. And it says here that surely after Callaghan embraced photography, he joined the newly founded Chrysler Camera Club. Now there he learned from his fellow club members that photography was important and extremely serious. Callaghan's participation in camera clubs over the next three years was a major force. A major force in helping him define what he did not want his photography to be. And I think, you know, we talked about camera clubs in the past on the channel and they have their purpose, but I think that's a lovely quote that sums up when camera clubs go bad, which sounds like a whole channel in itself. We can use Harry Callaghan's photographs as a starting point to start exploring the world. And we're going to begin with a fairly simple one to look at. And this is the photograph of a staircase. It's a simple stairwell photographed in Michigan and there's nothing too amazing about it on the surface. It's three plates of the same photograph or the same stairwell rather with the only thing that's changed are the people on it. Now individually, this photograph, it's okay. It's, you know, the individual frame. It's got a nice sort of strong graphic quality to it. It's got some movement going on. These are all basic things. But when you put the three of these images together, our mind is drawn to the thing that's different. We're going, what's different here? And the only thing that's different are the people going up and down the staircase. And that simple thing draws our attention to the staircase. It makes a mundane subject now so important. And you see this at work again and again and again through Harry Callaghan's photography. So try that next time, you know, find a simple graphic setup, some, you know, like a frame within a frame or something like that and just photograph three different versions of it, you know, all the same, but with something changing within that frame within and see how that impacts your photography. As someone who is starting photography, you quite often get exposed to photographs that, yeah, they don't make much sense. You kind of look at them and go, eh, not really getting that, why? What's the point of this? And so often that what's lacking is not an explanation really, because that is near a bit off. But the photographers reason, why did they photograph this particular thing? Why is this particular photograph important? And then Harry Callaghan's case, this photograph of these weeds is one of those images. It's on the face of you go, I don't get it, I don't understand. But then he talks in this book about clues, about how he was drawn to photograph those weeds for some particular reason. Then he printed them in this kind of high contrasty sort of way. So the weeds which are chaotic and mucky and rubbishy and what have you become something graceful and become something, you know, they're just lines, simple abstract lines. And he says, this was a clue, right? So he says, go off, search for clues. Because once he found that particular clue and the weeds were giving him a clue, it led him to then go and photograph other things, open up a world of possibilities within his own framework for subjects to be interpreted in a certain way. And this is kind of one of the things that I think we so often dismiss as photographers is this idea of being open to something, right? And having it draw us down a path that we would never have considered. And that's why I think this photograph is important now because now there's a context. Now I understand why. It was a key that unlocked Harry Callaghan's mind. And I'd love for you to be open to those clues. See if you photograph something any specific way, if it doesn't open up the world to you. And let's just go with that. Let's see what happens. In the past, I have talked about experimentation on this channel a lot. And one of the things that came to light when I was reading this book of Harry Callaghan is that he was a teacher. He was a teacher of photography and he said that experimentation was a good thing. However, experimentation for the sake of experimenting is just pointless. You need to learn to explore. That you need to see the world from as many different perspectives as possible. And only then will you start to realize how your photography is being shaped and interpreted by the thing that you are photographing. And an excellent example of this is Eleanor, right? Now Eleanor was a lady who Harry Callaghan photographed over a decade. And we're gonna look at this photograph now because it is such an important way of the many, many different ways that you can photograph and interpret a subject who is intimately attached to you. It's highly likely that you have seen one of the photographs of Eleanor at some point if you have spent any time thinking about improving your photography, right? I know certainly I was, I saw a couple of pictures of Eleanor when I was very young and at the time it's kind of like I don't really get this. Again, we were talking about why things, so don't really resonate with us as young photographers. And it's only now that I have kind of looked at the photography and that we are more aware about what is the thought process going on with Harry Callaghan's photography that we can see that this is now not just some snapshots of somebody who was intimately attached to Harry, but a possible, I can say actually possibly the world's greatest exercise in seeing the variety of ways that you can photograph a single subject, right? And that's kind of, I can't think of anything harder to do than to photograph somebody who is intimately attached to you, who you know the most minuscule details about in new and interesting ways all the time. And you look at all these photographs of Eleanor and not only are they technically different, you know, there's high contrast, there's low contrast, there's blurriness, there's out of, all these sort of things going on. But yet also he's never putting on the photographs his own preconceptions about Eleanor, the person, he's not making a judgment about her, he's not portraying her in a way that invites comment. And he's also not giving us preconceptions about the idea of femininity or womanhood. He's not giving us ideas about motherhood when she's photographed with Barbara. It is just simply a wonderful record of having a subject there and photographing how it makes you feel and seeing the variety of possibility within the images. The great wonder in Harry Callaghan's photographs is not only are they interesting photographs to look at but they are useful teaching aids. And I think this is the Harkinsback idea who's a teacher and he would often do the same exercises that he would give his pupils. And when we look at his photographs, they give us ideas about how we too can create images that have this sort of feeling. And one of the first aspects jumps to mind with Harry's photographs is that composition, traditional composition is kind of thrown out the window. Look at this photograph of Barbara. She is not where she in inverted commas should be in the frame. She's off all over the place. So firstly, don't worry too much about proper composition. Just see what works for you. And tied in with that very neatly is framing the subject or isolating the subject within the frame. And Harry Callaghan does this very well with very contrasty prints. And that's, again, you can see this state of experimentation and the experimentation has led to this result that he goes, oh, if I print all the shadows really black, if I go like this, you know, zone zero black, right? Then it helps isolate the subject and our eyes are drawn to this and it gives a very strong focal point to the photograph. And I think that's an important thing to remember when you are trying to sort of step in Harry Callaghan's footsteps. Throughout a lot of his photography, there's also a strong sense of abstraction. You know, we talked about the weeds earlier and you see this within his playing with light a lot. You know, those are very abstract photographs. And on the face of it, you could say his multiple exposures are abstract as well. They are almost abstract. But one of the things that I like certainly about his multiple exposures of cityscapes is that they convey a message about the city, all right? When he's done these multiple exposures, which probably again started off as an experiment, but when you look at them, go, do you know what? That sums up perfectly the chaoticness, the craziness of a city that it's a million miles an hour. It's constantly in your face. And what better way to describe that than these multiple exposures of the same scene? You know, it's just, it's a visual chaos. And I love that thing because we don't often really consider to see the world like that. The same goes for changing perspective. The city can be an overwhelming place, not only as a chaotic, but it looms over us. And when you get down on your knees, when you go to that cat's eye view and you photograph up the subjects walking past, it creates such a different perspective that gives an onemous sort of feeling. And you see that quite a lot in Harry Callaghan's, so for one of the better words, street photography, is that there's an ominous feeling in a lot of these figures looming over us. If somebody had to ask me one word that sums up Harry Callaghan's photography and his style, I would say it's compression. That a lot of his photographs feel like they're all existing on a flat plane, right? So this is kind of the opposite to what we get told a lot in photography about giving depth to a photograph, is that Harry goes the opposite direction and so many of his images, all the foreground and the subject and the background are all compressed and smushed up together. And if you want to do this, probably the easiest way to replicate that effect is to shoot with a longer lens. So we're not putting things in because the longer lens will compress the image. And it's weird because it makes us feel that we have to take all the elements as a whole, as one piece, right? And this is what happens when you put lots of elements together, because of their proximity to each other, they interact. And probably the easiest way for me to illustrate this is if I just do this, right? My hair is now grown quite a lot, right? Because of the pot plant is behind me. It's so close to my hair that you're kind of, you know, you have to read the two of them together. And this is why we get the horns growing out of people's heads by accident, things like that. So that's a simple visual technique that you can employ, you know, in this kind of very graphic sense of things that you have to start reading that I has to read all of them together. Do that the next time you're out. Try shooting the whole day with things compressed and see how the relationship between the things in your photograph change. There are a number of books about Harry Callaghan and I will link to them in the description box below. And if you are interested in seeing more about another fantastic photographer who has a wonderful sense of layering within his photographs, then I would check out this video right here. Okay, this is Alex Webb. I know you're gonna love him. Go and check him out and thanks again for watching.