Other Rooms (Limited Edition)

Print
C-print
Image Size: 7 7/8 x 7 3/4 in
Paper Size: 11 x 8 1/2 in
Edition of 20 and 3 artist proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

The limited-edition print Woman in Slip (1976–77) by Jo Ann Callis is a photograph published in Other Rooms (Aperture, 2014), the first comprehensive book of Callis’s seductive 1970s photographs. Other Rooms presents images that are psychologically weighty, seductive, and astutely staged. 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 he or she sees.