Harry Callahan met Eleanor Knapp in 1933 when both were working for the Chrysler Corporation in Detroit; they married three years later. Over the next several decades, but especially in the 1950s, Eleanor served as his muse and subject for numerous compositions. Callahan posed and photographed his wife on a regular basis, pursuing a seemingly endless range of possibilities: outdoors and indoors; dressed and undressed; in light and in shadow; her figure viewed in full or close-up. For Callahan, Eleanor’s face and body became a means to explore formal concerns of form, space, and light. His work has been described by one art historian as “a kind of visual diary—of his own visual experience rather than of his subject’s personality or essence.”