The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Clips: Jo Ann Callis

March 19, 2026·54 min·5 clips

Callis reveals how discovering Paul Outterbridge's archive transformed her approach to color in photography.

1. The Modern Art Notes Podcast host Tyler Green interviews feminist photographer Jo Ann Callis on the show's 750th episode, drawing from a 2014 conversation timed to Aperture's publication of Other Rooms. 2. Callis is presented as a leading feminist photographer whose work is held by MoMA, LACMA, and SFMOMA, and who received a Getty Museum retrospective titled Woman Twirling in 2009. 3. The episode's core question is how Callis constructed a personal erotic and feminist photographic language in 1970s Los Angeles, working outside the standard career trajectory. 4. Callis explains she enrolled at UCLA in 1970 as an undergraduate in her 30s, already married with two children, having previously used community college facilities at night just to make art. 5. Robert Heineken's class changed Callis's life, she says, because he encouraged students to create their own assignments and treated each student from wherever they were coming, never issuing prescribed exercises. 6. Callis's first exhibition was at the Woman's Building, the feminist art space in Los Angeles, though she emphasizes she 'was not protesting' and joined because a friend vacated her slot—'it was just a place to show it.' 7. Her decision to work in color was catalyzed by opening Paul Outterbridge's archive box at G. Ray Hawkins gallery, which arrived, she says, 'like Christmas,' revealing that color photography could be personal rather than documentary. 8. Callis explains that Outterbridge's Carbro prints showed her color could be 'a little off'—carrying emotional temperature through subtle warmth or coolness—rather than striving for correct color like most photographers of the period. 9. Discussing 'Hand in Honey' (1976–77), Callis describes choosing honey for its sweetness and tactility, draining the hand's color under strong light so it reads as abstracted, and leaving fingernails deliberately dirty to remove personality from the image. 10. The conversation dissects 'Woman with Belt' (1976–77), where Callis used a magenta gel on a hot light—never strobe, which she says she couldn't control—to create a shadow that 'reiterates a beautiful line between her arm and the shadow on the wall.' 11. Callis describes a series of photographs featuring restrained flesh—bands, belts, fishing-line wrapped around limbs—explaining that tightness heightens tactile sensitivity by filling tissue with blood, and that the restraint is aesthetic rather than threatening. 12. When Tyler raises feminist criticism that Callis objectified women by fragmenting their bodies, she responds that she applies identical treatment to male subjects and removes faces to shift focus from personality to bodily sensation. 13. Callis identifies surrealism as a natural influence because 'putting disparate things together' that 'don't literally make sense but make every bit of sense' parallels poetic logic—she cites Heineken's egg-in-hand photograph as an example of this non-rational meaning-making. 14. Callis attended Robert Heineken's 'Nude in the Landscape' workshop at Yosemite early in her career, joining Judy Dater, Jack Welpot, Lynn Bullitt, Heiko Hosoi, and Lucien Clair. 15. Tyler informs Callis that Judy Dater's photograph of Imogen Cunningham with model Twinka—taken on that same Yosemite trip—was the first frontal female nude printed in Life magazine, a fact Callis says she did not know. 16. Discussing her 'Ballast' series, Callis explains the photographs set reliable objects against a transient person whose open mouth looks simultaneously like laughing or screaming, noting the indeterminacy of those two expressions was deliberate. 17. Tyler identifies the goldfish appearing in Callis's 'Animal Food' pictures as a Matisse reference; Callis says she wasn't conscious of it but adds the goldfish was included because a bowl of water lets you see both the dorsal and top view simultaneously—'complex and beautiful.' 18. The 'Cheap Thrills / Forbidden Pleasures' dessert series is discussed in relation to Wayne Thiebaud's dessert paintings; Callis acknowledges loving his work but frames her project as being about guilt and desire—'you don't have to gain weight, you just look at them.' 19. The conversation moves between formal analysis and personal history, with Green regularly posing specific art-historical precedents (Bellmer, Outterbridge, Bacon, Thiebaud) and Callis evaluating whether they were conscious influences. 20. Listeners interested in feminist art history, 1970s Los Angeles photography, and the interplay of formalism with sexuality will find value here; those expecting a purely technical photography discussion may find the art-historical depth demanding.

As heard by us

Jo Ann Callis turns staged tension into a precise conversation about pleasure, form, and open-ended looking.

For its 750th show, The Modern Art Notes Podcast returns to Tyler Green's 2014 conversation with Jo Ann Callis, using the anniversary to point back toward feminist artists and histories that museums have too often left underexamined.

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A 750th-show rerun that lets Jo Ann Callis turn shadow into form.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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