The portraits of women walking through the streets of Chicago lost in thought produced by Harry Callahan in the 1950s are a metaphor of the isolation and solitude of urban life. Removed from their surroundings, all narrative references are eliminated. The image focuses on the intensity of the subject’s presence. The technical difficulties that surround these photographs are enormous, since the photographer and the model were both moving. Callahan took these shots with a 35 mm camera and a 90 mm lens, at an approximate distance of two meters.

Callhan’s work falls within the tradition of formal experimentation, embodied in the oeuvre of László Moholy-Nagy, a professor at The New Bauhaus, the art school that would later become the Chicago Institute of Design, where Callahan also taught from 1946 to 1961.