In 1976 Jo Ann Callis photographed bodies at the edge of a swimming pool, pressed against hot white cement under a sun bright enough to erase detail. Black Sun, issued by Nazraeli Press as the thirtieth title in its One Picture Book Two series, brings nine of those images together in duotone. The figures appear in near-silhouette, though not as pure shapes: Callis let faint traces of the body stay visible, so that each picture holds both a dark mass and the small evidence of a person inside it.

The work began from her attraction to the shadows of film noir, but she came to find shadow’s one-dimensionality limiting and moved toward the opposite condition. She later wrote that the appeal lay in lying on hot hard cement, that the lighting was natural and not made to look expressive, and that bright sunlight on white cement produced enough discomfort to suit her taste. The sentence she added is the hinge of the project: dark and unsettling lighting went to light and unsettling. What noir had done with darkness, these photographs attempt with exposure.

The book’s scale serves the series. At six by eight and a half inches, sixteen pages, with nine duotone plates, it reads as a compact statement rather than a survey, keeping the eye near the print surface where glare and cement do their work. Callis was born in Cincinnati and moved to Los Angeles in 1961; she enrolled at UCLA in 1970 and took classes with Robert Heinecken among other artists, began teaching at CalArts in 1976, and remains on its faculty. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, the Hammer Museum, and the Getty, among other institutions.

Black Sun is limited to five hundred numbered copies, each accompanied by a signed original print. That pairing gives the volume its weight: an early, tightly conceived body of work, made in the year she began teaching, held in a form built to contain it whole.