Generally a private woman, Eleanor Callahan didn’t get overly excited about her photograph being displayed in museums and galleries across the country. The wife of Harry Callahan, the celebrated American photographer, Mrs. Callahan saw herself as dutiful wife, who helped her husband explore his medium.
“She was modest and she tended to place herself in Harry’s shadow,” said Atlanta photographer Chip Simone, a student of Harry Callahan's at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1960s. “Not that she had to be there, but I think she chose to put Harry in front. For her, the notoriety was really Harry’s.”
She has been called a co-collaborator of her husband’s work, but rejected those assertions. In a 2007 Atlanta Journal-Constitution interview, she told a reporter her posing for and supporting her husband was what you do for the one you love.
“Any time he’d ask [to take my picture], I’d say OK,” Mrs. Callahan said at the time. “I would be getting dinner ready and he’d say, ‘Eleanor, the light is just good here.' I'd say, ‘Just give me a minute.’”
Never, she said, "did I ever say no to Harry.”
Eleanor Knapp Callahan, of Atlanta, died Tuesday from complications associated with cancer. She was 95. Her remains were cremated and a private family memorial will be held. Cremation Society of Georgia was in charge of arrangements.
She married Harry Callahan in 1936, three years after they met on a blind date. When they wed, she knew her husband’s passion for photography was an inherent part of him.
“She had an extraordinary commitment to Harry and an understanding of what was required for an artist to make their work,” said Julian Cox, chief curator for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the former High Museum of Art photography curator. “She provided for him, provided the love, provided the home, providing the means.”
The Callahans moved to Atlanta in the '80s and lived around the corner from their daughter and her family. They had been marred for 63 years when Mr. Callahan died in 1999.
Mrs. Callahan was not an idle woman just waiting for her next opportunity to pose, nor did she like “sitting around twiddling her thumbs,” said Barbara Callahan Hollinger, the couple’s only child.
“She was a woman in her own right,” Mrs. Hollinger said. “She was an extremely strong woman who enjoyed life. She lived to 95 and you don’t do that unless you can take all of the knocks that life has to give you and then keep on going.”
Mrs. Hollinger said her mother “simply adored her father,” and did not mind doing what she needed to do so that he could continue his passion.
Mrs. Callahan had a successful career as an executive secretary and was the financial backbone of the household. In the 2007 interview she said: “My money would go right to the photography. Whatever he needed.”
Her son-in-law, Michael Hollinger, said she was a woman ahead of her time.
“She was functioning in a way that was not the norm for women of that time,” he said. “She was a working woman, she was a mother and she was the object of artful expression.”
Mrs. Callahan is also survived by two granddaughters, Emily Hollinger and Allison Hollinger, both of New York.
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