Process

"As an artist who is more interested in the process than the product, who works through the medium to discover and ultimately know and understand both himself and his world, Callahan does not think of ion terms of creating photographic masterpieces, singular and complete unto themselves." Sarah Greenough on Harry Callahan

Sarah Greenough is senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She was the founding curator of photographs at the National Gallery where she has organized numerous exhibitions, including Alfred Stieglitz (1983), On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography (1989), Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (2001), André Kertész (2005), and Irving Penn: Platinum Prints (2005) that have also traveled to museums around the world. Most recently, she was co-curator of The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (2007) and organized Richard Misrach: On the Beach (2008) for exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.

Greenough is the author of many publications, including Walker Evans: Subways and Streets (1991), Robert Frank: Moving Out (1994), Harry Callahan (1996), Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set (2002), and All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860 (2004), with Malcolm Daniel and Gordon Baldwin.
Her exhibitions and publications have won many awards, including the International Center of Photography Publications Award for On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography and the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set. In 2007, she and co-author Diane Waggoner won the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr. award for outstanding museum scholarship for their exhibition catalogue, The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888–1978. (http://www.nga.gov/press/bios/greenough.shtm)

I found this statement very interesting. The outcome, the finished product is often thought of as being much more important than the actual process that formed the finished piece. With Callahan's work his process took most of his life. He kept on working, not looking for a "masterpiece", but working for the sake of process both technically and in his life. His subjects changed and aged with time as did his ideas, techniques, processes, and visions with his work.

I am interested in process as being a major theme in my work. Going from an 8mm film camera, to a VHS, to the television or projector, then being recorded again onto film and being reproduced in a tangible form, on paper in the darkroom. I don't feel that process is the most important theme in my project but it is an important component. In past experiences, working through different photographic processes, the process usually takes me and my work somewhere I had not expected when I first started. I am excited to start the process, with an idea, and see how things evolve with time and work.