Throughout his career, Harry Callahan repeatedly observed the city in a series of works that offered a novel vision of the urban experience. In these photographs, above all else, an inventive sensibility prevailed. It crystallizes into a heterogeneous ensemble where close-up shots of buildings and nearly abstract mechanisms, schematizations clearly inspired by the avant-garde, stand out.

In 1950, coinciding with a period in which realist photography was the prevailing style, Harry Callahan produced the series Women Lost in Thought, considered a milestone in urban photography. It encompassed an ensemble of close-up shots captured by Callahan without the subjects knowing they were being photographed. For this purpose Callahan carried a 35 mm camera with a telephoto lens as he wandered through the streets of Chicago. The compositions of the photographs were partly the outcome of a series of constraints, such as movement and distance, but also borne from a number of formal and technical decisions that aimed for the greatest possible image density. The resulting photographs were grainy, featured little detail, and had an abrupt tonal scale. With these photographs, Callahan distanced himself from the usual language of street photography and direct photography’s characteristic pursuit of sharpness and clarity, which he had practiced at the beginning of his career.