"These pictures are not only about sex but about the limits and 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. Since the 1960s Callis has been circling around these complex and often opposing emotions in photos that are at once aesthetic and discomfiting, delicate and raw, mysterious and thoughtful."
- Francine Prose, Other Rooms, Aperture, 2014
Both Callis’s early black & white and color pictures, taken while studying under Robert Heinecken at UCLA, attest to the artist’s singular and lasting influence on photography through her inventive analysis of the pleasures and terrors of domestic comfort. In her work from the 70’s, Callis merges perceived pain and apparent pleasure into a complex, inclusive representation of sensuality and sexual curiosity. Her deft use of opposing textures invites the viewer to lightly graze a sumptuous silk pinned to a grubby wall and tug at the taut string crisscrossing the model’s backside. While many of the photographs depict restraint marks, smeared lipstick, and leather, this work is rooted not in sadism but in tenderness.
Early Color was originally photographed in 1975-76. Twenty-two of these images were reprinted in 2012 and made into a portfolio with the assistance of ROSEGALLERY.