Cheap Thrills gathers thirteen color photographs Jo Ann Callis made in the early 1990s. Desserts are arranged and lit so that they acquire a bodily, flirtatious presence. They belong to her series “Cheap Thrills: Forbidden Pleasures,” one of several bodies of work from that period in which she explored gender and sexuality. The humor runs dry, the suggestiveness is deliberate, and these are not food pictures in any ordinary sense. They are tabletop constructions that implicate appetite, decorum, and the pleasure of looking.
The book appears in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, a format with its own discipline: sixteen pages, hardcover, a single photographic sequence, and, according to the publisher, an original signed print accompanying a numbered edition. The compression matters. Callis emerged in the late 1970s among the first significant practitioners of the fabricated photograph, building images from fabric, food, and clay figures she shaped herself rather than finding them ready-made. That method meets a subject here that rewards proximity. Color, surface, and a teasing theatricality are difficult to sustain across a large book but can be potent when held close.
Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, and SFMOMA, and in 2009 the J. Paul Getty Museum presented a retrospective, Woman Twirling. What matters for this project is the date and the project: a compact early-1990s investigation of appetite and display, extending the concerns Callis pursued across several series at the time. The institution list is context for the artist, not an argument about the book.
For a collector, the interest lies in the conjunction of a specific, self-contained project with the book form and, as the publisher describes it, the signed print and numbered edition. Callis is the photographer; the plates are her photographic content, reproduced alongside that separate print. The album does not gather multiple photographers. No claim is made here about rarity, critical reception, or market value.
