Galerie Miranda proposes a new dialogue between two bodies of photographic work previously exhibited at the gallery as solo shows: Dirty Windows, black and white documentary series by Merry Alpern made in NYC in 1994-95; and Early Color by Jo Ann Callis, staged photographs made in Los Angeles 1974-75. Two women artists whose photographs explore the grey zones of sex and power; fiction and reality; freedom, desire and constraint.
For its autumn 2025 exhibition, Galerie Miranda invites us to reconsider these two huis clos from the perspective of women’s status today: the hyper sexualisation of women’s bodies on social media is being accompanied in many countries by the return of a conservative vision of sexual politics, and the overturning of hitherto enshrined rights such as those established by Roe vs Wade. Through this contemporary prism, these two photographic huis clos, made in 1975 and 1995, remain deeply relevant by the way the artists created their images and by the fundamental subjects they address. Working from very different positions, documentary and fiction, these two women artists develop their central subject, of trapped women, with a similar visual construction: cinematographic, fragmented, constrained and faceless bodies that provoke our imagination and continue to question visual paradigms of power and sexuality. As Callis commented recently, the fact that her images have stayed so relevant, shows “that things haven’t changed enough”.
Merry Alpern (b. 1955, USA)
Merry Alpern is a contemporary American photographer known for her controversial oeuvre and utilization of surveillance photography. Born on March 15, 1955 in New York, NY, Alpern studied sociology at Grinnell College in Iowa but returned to New York before graduating in order to pursue photography. Her first solo exhibition, in 1989 at the Camera Club of New York, documented the struggle of a homeless, crack-addicted couple and their desperation to survive. The series was widely published and received numerous national awards and grants. In 1999, following the Dirty Windows series, Merry Alpern produced the series Shopping whereby, equipped with a tiny surveillance camera and a video camcorder hidden in her discreetly perforated purse, Alpern wandered through department stores, malls, and fitting rooms, seeking to capture and understand the obsessive quest – by both herself and by other women shoppers – for the ultimate purchase. Today, her works are in key American and European collections including: Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX; International Center of Photography, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; New Orleans Museum of Fine Art, LA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and in Europe, the FC Gundlach Collection, Hamburg, Germany; Foundation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Koerfer Collection, Zurich, Switzerland; Wilson Centre for Photography, London, UK. Merry Alpern currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Jo Ann Callis (b. 1940, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA)
Jo Ann Callis is a photographer based in Los Angeles. After graduating from UCLA she began teaching at CalArts in 1976 and is still a faculty member of the School of Art’s Program in Photography and Media. The subject of over 40 personal exhibitions, her work has been acquired by major private and public collections and exhibited internationally including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2009, the J. Paul Getty Museum presented a retrospective of her work in Los Angeles titled Woman Twirling. Callis has received three NEA Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Merry Alpern & Jo Ann Callis : Huis Clos
Until November 1st 2025
Galerie Miranda
21 rue du Chateau d’Eau
75010 Paris, France
Du mercredi au samedi 14h-19h ou sur rendez-vous
www.galeriemiranda.com
