Harry Callahan

Had Richard Prince organized this show, he would’ve called it “Twenty Women Looking in Every Direction.” But Harry Callahan, an acclaimed though under-exhibited photographer perhaps best known for loving, often experimental portraits of his wife Eleanor, was out on the streets of Chicago in 1950, and this series, titled “Women Lost in Thought,” presages Garry Winogrand’s sidewalk snaps as much as it does Prince’s postmodern Conceptualism. To take these extreme close-ups of women out for a stroll, Callahan had to push the technological limits of his equipment (choosing a too-high shutter speed for the film he was using) and devise idiosyncratic shooting techniques (pre-focusing the camera and hoping his subjects were the proper distance from the lens). It’s hard not to view these women, completely isolated from their surroundings, as early examples of then-emerging theories about urban anomie; they could be the wives left behind in the morning by William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man.” They look alternately sullen, animated, and impassive, and the frisson of violence implied by the odd, sometimes harsh cropping adds yet more psychological portent to pictures whose fascination is belied by their seeming simplicity.