This silver print, Eleanor, was taken circa 1947 by Harry Callahan of his longtime wife.

Museum of Art / Harry Callahan

PROVIDENCE

Few photographers could do more with less than Harry Callahan. Give him a broken window and he’d turn it into a striking study of light and shadow. Give him a nondescript factory building and he’d transform it into a gritty piece of urban sculpture. Give him a few blades of grass and he’d produce a picture as purely and precisely composed as a Japanese ink drawing.

Ultimately, such pictures earned Callahan a reputation as a formalist — that is, someone who’s more interested in the fine points of line, shape and pattern than in the flesh-and-blood realities of daily life. And certainly there’s an air of restraint, even aloofness, to many of Callahan’s pictures — a sense that the photographer is observing a scene without really being a part of it.

Yet there was always another, more personal side to Callahan’s work.

That much is clear from the remarkable series of photographs that Callahan took of his longtime wife and muse, Eleanor. Ranging from intimate portraits to plump Rubensesque nudes to more experimental works that explore various strands of surrealism and abstraction, they constitute one of the most important and influential bodies of work in the history of American photography.

As it happens, these groundbreaking pictures are also the focus of a new exhibit at the RISD Museum. Organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and titled simply “Harry Callahan: Eleanor,” the show brings together about 80 photographs spanning more than two decades.

The result is something you don’t see very often in a museum exhibition: a love story. Of course, the show is other things as well, including a mini-survey of 20th-century photography. (Though often typecast as a formalist, Callahan experimented with a wide variety of styles, ranging from surrealistic dreamscapes and double exposures to plainspoken street scenes).

It’s also a fitting tribute to Callahan, a Detroit native who came to Providence in 1961 to head the newly formed photography program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Together with his close friend Aaron Siskind, Callahan helped turn RISD into a photographic mecca that attracted scores of talented students and faculty — among them the noted Southern photographer Emmet Gowin and the pioneering environmental chronicler David Hanson. (Sadly, Callahan died in 1996.)

Yet at its core, “Harry Callahan: Eleanor” is a love story.

Actually, make that two love stories. The first begins in 1933, when a shy shipping clerk named Harry Morey Callahan starts dating an executive secretary named Eleanor Annette Knapp. At the time, both Knapp and Callahan were in their early 20s and working for Chrysler Motors, making them something of a rarity among their Depression-era peers: a two-income couple.

(In an essay for the exhibition catalog, the High Museum’s photography curator, Julian Cox, quotes Eleanor as saying that “something between us just clicked” — a wonderful turn of phrase for what would became one of the great photographic partnerships of the 20th century.)

The second love story begins in 1941, five years after the Callahans’ marriage. That’s when Harry, who had dabbled in photography since the late 1930s, attended a workshop organized by the Detroit Photo Guild. The featured guest that night was the great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams.

In addition to his photographic skills, Adams was a dynamic speaker whose appearances were closer to tent revival meetings than traditional photo workshops. By the time Adams left town, Callahan, who had been an avid golfer for much of his life, had a new passion: photography.

In fact, as Callahan explained in a 1957 interview, the encounter with Adams literally changed his life. “That’s when I began to find myself. For the first time I met a serious photographer who lived, breathed and expressed himself in his work. It was through him that … I became aware that a man’s whole life could be spent in what I, up to this time, thought of only as a hobby.”

With Adams as his role model, Callahan quickly developed a way of working that he would follow, more or less, for the rest of his life. In the morning, he would set off with his camera, often taking hundreds of pictures of whatever interested him: a shattered factory window, the zigzag shadow cast by a tenement fire escape, Christmas shoppers pausing outside a department store, a row of trees outlined against a snowy background. In the afternoon, Callahan would return to his studio where he would spend hours poring over the day’s pictures, searching for one or two gems.

Callahan was also fortunate in his choice of friends. One of the most important was Arthur Siegel, a successful teacher and commercial photographer. Siegel, whose Detroit studio was stocked with books on art and art history, helped introduce Callahan to modern art movements such as surrealism and cubism.

Siegel also recommended Callahan for his first teaching job — at the so-called New Bauhaus school in Chicago. True to its name, the school was modeled on Germany’s legendary Bauhaus art academy. It was here that Callahan came into contact with a group of real-life modernists, including the Hungarian photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and German architect Mies van der Rohe.

At about the same time, Callahan began taking his first pictures of Eleanor.

The show’s earliest work, for example, is a grainy 1941 close-up of Eleanor standing under a tree. Judging by the small size of the image (it’s not much bigger than a man’s wallet), it was printed directly from the negative — a practice recommended by Adams for producing the best-quality prints. At the same time, the striking play of shadows on Eleanor’s face — including a dark zebra-like stripe that falls directly across her left eye — suggests ties to both surrealism and expressionism.

Another portrait, taken a year later, is equally striking. It features a swirling pattern of grass and other plants superimposed over a close-up of Eleanor’s face. Besides highlighting Callahan’s increasing willingness to take risks with his pictures, the pairing of human and nature imagery introduces another theme that recurs throughout the exhibit: Eleanor as Earth Mother.

Callahan adopts a more matter-of-fact approach in a series of portraits from 1945. Taken during a trip to New York City, they show Eleanor standing in front of a variety of backgrounds, including a brick wall, a tenement and, in the series’ most unusual work, a street lamp that seems to sprout, incongruously, from Eleanor’s head.

Looking at these pictures now, it’s easy to miss how strange they must have seemed at the time. For one thing, Eleanor Callahan isn’t your typical model. With her broad face, high cheekbones and dark hair and eyes, she has an undeniable presence. Yet you wouldn’t call her conventionally pretty. Similarly, when she faces the camera, it’s not with the come-hither look of a professional artist’s model. Instead, her gaze is steady and self-contained — more sphinx-like than sexy.

In fact, compared to most artist-model relationships, the one between the Callahans comes across as surprisingly chaste. This isn’t Picasso ogling the young Dora Maar or Matisse celebrating the languid sensuality of the female form. Even the nude studies typically have a brisk, workmanlike air.

Yet Harry Callahan obviously loved his wife.

That much is clear from the sheer number of times he photographed her. More importantly, it’s apparent in the dizzying number of ways Callahan found to portray his wife and muse. There are close-ups, like the great 1947 shot of Eleanor, her arms folded over her head like a piece of human origami.

Other photographs emphasize space and distance. These include a remarkable series of pictures from 1953, in which Eleanor and the Callahans’ daughter, Barbara, pose against a variety of backgrounds, including the Chicago skyline and what appears to be a deserted train station.

There are the pictures of Eleanor outdoors, including one memorable shot where she emerges, Venus-like, from a pool of water. And there are the pictures of Eleanor indoors, among them several that evoke the brooding interiors of another mid-century master: Edward Hopper.

There are times when Callahan zeros in on a single body part — a breast, an eye, the soft curve of a hip — and other times when Eleanor nearly disappears into a larger landscape or street scene. It’s a pattern that continues in Callahan’s more self-consciously experimental works, including several where Eleanor’s ample form appears as little more than a ghostly shadow.

Ironically, at the time many of these pictures were taken, Callahan was known mainly as a creator of taut but somewhat bloodless compositions. In other words, a formalist.

In recent years, however, a younger generation of photographers, including contemporary art stars such as Sally Mann and Nan Goldin, have used Callahan’s Eleanor photos as a springboard for exploring their own families (and, in Goldin’s case, extended families).

Why have these photographs become so popular? Maybe because it’s so easy to feel the love.

“Harry Callahan: Eleanor” runs through Feb. 15 at the RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St., Providence. Hours: Tues.-Sun. 10-5. Admission: $10 adults, $7 seniors, $3 ages 5-18 and college students with I.D., members and under 5 free. Contact (401) 454-6500 or www.risdmuseum.org.

bvansicl@projo.com