Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms
Jo Ann Callis and Francine Prose
Other Rooms, the first publication to comprehensively feature Jo Ann Callis’s mid-1970s investigation of the nude body and sexuality, is a revelation; the work is provocative, seductive, and remarkably fresh. The artist’s playful, evocative use of constrictions and overlays on the human form, including twine, belts, tape, and other everyday materials are both humorous and fraught, offering an intensely personal assessment of the variable meanings of pleasure, eros, and the female nude as a staple of fine art photography. Callis has been an active artist since the 1960s, working in painting, sculpture, and photography, among other mediums, and is known for capturing complex and often opposing emotions in a single piece. Other Rooms is an exquisitely produced artist’s book containing Callis’s photographs of the human form from her 1976–77 provisionally titled series Early Color, as well as a selection of black-and-white photographs from the same period. In this intimate volume, Callis photographs her models nude, frequently in close proximity, and in anonymous and mysterious settings, juxtaposing tactile props like honey, sand, and fabric with skin. The photographs in Other Rooms are at once beautiful and discomfiting, delicate and raw, mysterious and thoughtful, and confirm Callis’s important place in the history of 1970s color photography.
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