In 1946, Callahan moved with his wife Eleanor to Chicago, after being appointed by László Moholy-Nagy (who sadly died that fall) to teach photography at the Institute of Design (ID). Moholy-Nagy and Ansel Adams formed the dueling impulses for Callahan’s work, which achieved a personal yet widely influential synthesis of European experimentation and plainspoken American grandeur. As a teacher at the ID from 1946 until 1961, Callahan mentored other budding photographers through example. He wandered the street and parks of Chicago alone, or with his students, taking photographs almost every day and developing the negatives at night. He made his own prints and never cropped his images. Simply titled Chicago, 1946, Lot 89 was taken and printed at the very beginning of the seventeen years Callahan spent there. Reduced to a flat plane of windswept sand and seemingly lacking a subject, Chicago is a bold postwar image that exemplifies at the start Callahan’s long-term goals: “I think nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness – the point where you can’t go any further.”

Dearborn Street, Chicago, 1948 (Lot 88) – a stunning image of a building façade transformed into an allover pattern of black and white rectangles - was chosen to illustrate the 1951 announcement for the opening of a gallery devoted to photography at the Art Institute. The inaugural exhibition, Creative and Penetrating Photographs by Harry Callahan, was also the photographer’s first solo exhibition in a museum.