Photo London 2026

ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present a selection of works by Jo Ann Callis at Photo London 2026, featuring images drawn from three of the artist's celebrated series: Early Color, Dish Trick, and Decor. Together, the works offer an intimate cross-section of Callis's enduring preoccupations: the psychological weight of domestic space, the tension between desire and unease, and the transformative power of the everyday object.

Produced in 1976–77 at Callis's home in Los Angeles, Early Color remains one of the most quietly radical bodies of work in American photography. The series evokes the pleasures and tensions of domestic life, deploying contrasting and often banal textures including silk, leather, duct tape, honey, and taut string against the skin of the model to construct images that resist easy categorization. Working at the height of the women's liberation movement, Callis crafted enigmatic visual metaphors of power and play, dominance and submission, desire and intimacy. Though political in its moment, she did not frame the series as advocacy, saying she was "more concerned with making work that was strong in its own right, rather than using it to make a statement.”

In Dish Trick, Callis offers a poetic and psychological exploration of everyday objects, inviting viewers to consider the silent power these forms hold in our lives. Callis describes the work as a deconstruction of traditional still life. Rather than arranging elements into a static scene, she isolates and re-examines each one on its own terms. "I originally thought of taking a still life and taking it apart," she says, "looking at each object individually."

For her series Decor, Callis turns her attention to the furnished interior as both subject and psychological terrain. Working with fastidiously crafted miniature furniture of her own making, she photographs these objects in close-up, fetishizing the banality of interior design through careful manipulations of lighting, shadow, perspective, and texture. The images carry an almost surreal charge, rendering familiar household objects strange and psychologically loaded. Seductive and unnerving in equal measure, they resist documentary readings in favor of something more interior. As Callis has said, "The photograph is highly structured, so you don't think it is a real home or a real room, but a room made to evoke something. It's a room in your mind." 

Across all three series, Callis operates as both artist and architect of her images, designing and constructing the props, sets, and environments that appear within them. Her photographs are never discovered but always made, staged with the precision of a painter and the psychological acuity of an artist deeply attuned to the charged, often unsettling life of objects and interiors.