#99 Mexico
Photograph
#99 Mexico
1969
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.1 × 16.1 cm (6 5/16 × 6 5/16 in.)
Paper: 22.7 × 20.4 cm (8 15/16 × 8 1/16 in.)
Matted: 45.5 × 35.5 × 0.3 cm (17 15/16 × 14 × 1/8 in.)
Museum accession
1981.1135.0032
Inscriptions verso (handwritten in pencil): #99 Mexico 1969
TextOver the course of his long and distinguished career, Harry Callahan photographed nature, buildings, and people, continually developing new ways of what he called “seeing photographically.” For Callahan, photographic seeing often entailed combining the direct approach of American modernism with the perceptual experimentalism of European modernism—crisp detail matched by disorienting angles. Here, a busy facade is coupled with the intersecting diagonals, as opposed to perpendiculars, of the pilaster and the cornice, creating a vertiginous view of an otherwise pedestrian building.
