Jo Ann Callis: Woman in Slip, 1976–77

Woman in Slip (1976–77) was published in Other Rooms (2014), the first comprehensive book of Jo Ann Callis’s seductive 1970s photographs. Other Rooms presents psychologically weighty, seductive, and astutely staged images. Working with color film, Callis mastered the ability to illustrate opposing emotions in one frame. By cropping out the subject’s head, the image Woman in Slip focuses powerfully on a moment where the push and pull of beauty and angst hold center stage.

Francine Prose articulates this focal point in her introduction to the book, where she writes, “These pictures are not only about sex but about the limits and the edges of photography, its power to get up in our faces. They ask whether it is possible to photograph a thought—whether an image can represent something simultaneously sensual and cerebral.” It is also Callis’s visual expertise and decision-making—her green, lilac, and fleshy hues, all seemingly from the same palette—that seduce the viewer to dive deeply into the photograph and to contemplate the complexity of what they see. Since the 1960s, Callis has been circling these complex and often opposing emotions in photographs that are at once aesthetic and discomfiting, delicate and raw, mysterious and thoughtful. The tension in her color photographs is one of her unique contributions to the history of the medium.

Each limited-edition print is hand-packed with great care and ships from New York within 3–5 days.