Paris Photo 2026
Born decades apart on opposite ends of the Americas, Jo Ann Callis and Tania Franco Klein demonstrate the profound ways that women photographers speak to one another across time. Though many of Callis’s images were made decades prior to those of Franco Klein, they exist in close dialogue: Callis’s preoccupation with the disquiet belongs also to Franco Klein; Franco Klein’s frenetic and vulnerable approach to the anxieties of modern life finds a counterpart in Callis’s constructed mid-century worlds.
As is the case for so many artists whose work foregrounds feminist and psychological landscapes, Callis’s and Franco Klein’s works are sometimes framed as predominantly engaged with the “domestic.” But, while often situated within fragmented or interior spaces, their cinematic tableaus reach for something else, too. Across their practices, Callis and Franco Klein co-opt and subvert commercial visual languages—in particular, via their highly saturated, seductive use of color—to examine notions of power, sexuality, anxiety, isolation, and outrage.
A pioneer of color photography and the late-1970s “fabricated photography” movement, Callis plunges viewers into precarious, already-unfolding scenes in her series Ballast (1984–5). Figures appear out-of-focus or mid-motion, their gestures held in perpetual tension. As is the case across her oeuvre, Callis uses color as a vital emotional conduit, often through the use of stylized artificial lighting. Her scenes are not subtle—they are sensual and unsettling, playful and pulsing. These vintage Cibachromes prints, which appear to be lit from within, are remarkable for their stability, unlike other color processes of the era. The works on view in Paris represent the last Ballast Cibachromes remaining in the artist’s studio.
Based in Mexico City, Franco Klein has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary photography. The fragmented figures in her work—often the artist in costuming—appear in mirrors, motion, and silhouette; elsewhere, they are visible only through glass, water, or deep shadow. Franco Klein meticulously stages each image, structuring urgent questions about the anxieties and social behaviors of our hyperconnected digital age around objects that provoke visceral emotion and narrative possibility. In RAGE™, her newest series, Franco Klein explores this emotion as something widely felt in response to world events but also manufactured and weaponized by mainstream media and political elites.
Finally, Callis and Franco Klein will each present a selection of images originally created for Fendi and Versace. Last year, within a matter of days, these legendary fashion houses sought out both artists, asking them to bring the full weight of their artistic visions—and their distinct photographic languages—to their campaigns. The resulting images align effortlessly with their studio practices, especially as Callis and Franco Klein have long built sets and used fabrics, objects, clothing, and textiles to invoke sensation and memory. In a highly unusual approach to advertising imagery, Callis and Franco Klein both closely cropped the figures, and even the clothing and shoes, in their photographs, creating images that prioritize storytelling over product and treat fashion as a complex vehicle for personal identity.
Whether a pair of scissors, stilettos, or red-painted toes; a shag carpet; a lamp; a mirror; or an outstretched hand; the objects and gestures in Callis’s and Franco Klein’s images are never just as they appear. They offer rich and enigmatic metaphors, demonstrating how the fabricated image can transform the seductive surfaces of history, current events, and commercial fashion into profound, complex instruments of human emotion.
