Zach Callahan – Exhaust – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Looking at Zach Callahan’s photobook Exhaust, the three words that occurred to me were simple, focused, and convincing.

Let me explain the simple part first. There are 36 color photographs, one to a page spread. Ten or so are portraits where the subject is engaging the photographer directly, and in another 9 the subject is possibly unaware of being photographed. The rest can be categorized as things and places. In terms of sequencing, images of people alternate in singles or doubles with images of places and things, so that the people are contextualized by the places around them – simple but effective. The compositions mirror the everyday act of seeing and appear artless.

As he explains in his text, Callahan’s focus is the Los Angeles not visible from a car, the parallel L.A. social landscape of pedestrians and bicyclists and bus riders and the in-between lived-in spaces where you see the accumulated evidence of ordinary people getting through life as best they can. No swimming pools, movie stars, gangstas, or surfer dudes in Exhaust but rather concrete, litter, and middle-aged people with thinning hair.

Exhaust is convincing because it is understated and memorable, and Callahan’s pictures of ordinary people directly engaging the camera are especially strong. He does not patronize or romanticize them but shows them with immense empathy. His Angelenos are humble but undefeated folks going about their mostly blue-collar lives with dignity and without complaint. Their silent stories and the tension between their vulnerability and strength remind us of our shared humanity.

Several of the pictures make me think of the work of other contemporary photographers. The first photo of the man juxtaposed against a building being demolished for me echoes Joel Sternfeld’s fireman buying a pumpkin while a house burns nearby. Bruce Davidson might have taken a photo of a woman holding her two dogs. Diane Arbus could have made the photo of the man with slicked-back hair, but she would have made him look weird rather than dignified. I could go on, but my point is that Callahan has absorbed the broad influence of American straight documentary photography and seems comfortable continuing the tradition in Exhaust.

When I saw the photograph of the two house painters having lunch, I didn’t think of photography but of painting. It reminded me of 19^th century paintings of peasants, workers, and ordinary people: Courbet’s stone breakers, Cezanne’s card players, Van Gogh’s potato eaters. Callahan’s L.A. painters sit outside in the street on their improvised chairs in all their factual visual there-ness, tranquilos, about to eat their lunch.

The title of the book can be read a couple of ways, as a noun and as a verb. It can refer to the exhaust gasses and pollution from vehicles, of which there is plenty in L.A., or to physically or mentally exhaust someone, which is what the daily working struggle can do.

As a book, Exhaust does a lot of things right. It is not flashy or clever but rather quiet, straightforward, and deceptively modest. Simple, focused, and convincing, its images serve as enduring examples of human resilience.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Zach Callahan – Exhaust

Photographer: Zach Callahan (born in 1984)

Text – Alexandra Martinez

Language: English

Design: Laure-Anne Kayser

Printing and Production: SYL, Barcelona

Softbound with printed cover; 36 color photographs; perfect bound; 80 pages; ISBN 979-8-218-41061-2; unpaginated; 8 x 9 inches

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