Editor’s Note: In Snap, we look at the power of a single photograph, chronicling stories about how both modern and historical images have been made.

In 1977, Jo Ann Callis took a photograph of a woman’s head thrown back, her neck taut and tied with a bow looped together from the thin baby blue straps of her white lace dress. It’s an image that beckons a long look, as the tension heightens in its stillness: the woman’s exposed neck strains at the angle, a light red marking peeking out near the tightly bound choker thread. Just above her shoulder, two wallpaper birds dive together, their beaks nearly touching in either an amorous or aggressive dance.

Though she made the image four and a half decades ago, “Woman with Blue Bow” seems strikingly contemporary — a timeless symbol on the strictures of femininity. It is currently exhibiting in the group show “Del Cielo” at Rosegallery in Santa Monica, California, but has been featured in Callis’ exhibitions over the decades as well as her 2009 book, “Woman Twirling.”

Callis is a pioneer of both staged photography and color film in fine art, with her early work depicting shadowy, intensely psychological portraits of women. Her subjects are often kept anonymous through turned heads and cropped frames. They are images with undercurrents of desire and unease: In one, a man’s hands grab the ankles of a woman in heels standing on a chair; in another, a blonde woman is seen from behind and above in bed, her body divided by a single black line that begins with the part in her hair and continues down her spine.

“All those pictures seem to have a sense of pleasure,” Callis explained in a phone interview. “But it goes back and forth between discomfort and comfort.”

In “Blue Bow,” the model poses with her face away from the camera — “a woman standing for all women,” Callis said. Recently divorced at the time she took the photo, Callis was thinking of the limitations that she had experienced in her life, and the restrictive expectations of her gender. She had returned to graduate school for photography while raising her two young children.

“The world opened up to me,” she recalled, explaining that she’d painted and sculpted at home until then. “When I went back to school, I felt so liberated… So that’s, you know, so that’s what that work was about, just freedom and constraint.”

‘Beautiful, but a little bit off’

Callis made her early color work at the peak of the feminist art movement, as artists including Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta were exploring gender, power and politics through images of the female body. Though Callis and her body of work fits neatly within this cohort, it’s not a label that Callis adopted, then or now. “But of course, I guess I am,” she added.

She made “Blue Bow” thinking of her own years as a teenager in the 1950s, when it was standard for women to wear crinolines under dresses — garments “which were terribly uncomfortable,” she noted — and, sometimes, ribbons around the neck for formal occasions. Other constraining fashions came to mind too, from the centuries-long tradition of foot binding in China to more subtle limitations of mobility in garments like pencil skirts, all keeping women’s fashion in line with gendered social expectations.

The red imprint on the model’s neck, alluding to discomfort, was not actually caused by the bow, Callis explained, but was rather an illusion thanks to makeup. It’s just one of the many nuances in her color work that she would not have been able to pull off in black and white. At the time, however, color photography was still seen as gauche in fine art circles, with William Eggleston’s landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Photographs” stirring controversy for its snapshot-like color scenes the year prior.

Like Eggleston and later, the filmmaker David Lynch, among others, Callis saw the potential in tapping into lurid hues that could transform the mood of an image. She was greatly inspired by the images of Paul Outerbridge, who lensed full-color erotic portraits of nude women in the 1930s, decades ahead of his time.

“I thought color would add another emotional element to the work,” she said. “I like sour colors — beautiful, but a little bit off. That’s still the palette I like.”

The cinematic qualities of her work are a nod to filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, who also influenced her aesthetic. But she has, in turn, been a source of inspiration for both staged photography as well as filmmaking — notably, Sofia Coppola has cited “Blue Bow” as a photograph she kept returning to in the making of her 2017 film “The Beguiled,” about a Civil War-era school for girls.

“It fits the feeling in ‘The Beguiled’ of frustration and being trapped in ultra-femininity,” Coppola wrote of the photograph in her recent book “Archive.”

The fact that Callis’ image has such staying power is “discouraging, in some ways, that things haven’t changed enough,” Callis said. “In contemporary relationships there is more equality, but not always. Women are often the ones who take care of the home and the cooking, even if they’re working.”

But another theme in her image remains lasting, too, seen in the tension between photographer and subject, and the two birds frozen as they come together, mirrored in their symmetry.

“When you’re in a relationship, it’s a give and take,” she said. “You’re always giving up something in order to get something else.”

Canadian astronaut and photographer Dr. Roberta Bondar doesn’t mind doing some kind-of-crazy things in pursuit of wildlife photography. 

That includes hanging out of helicopters to get her desired shot.

“It is not for the faint of heart,” Bondar said, speaking at a Nov. 10 press conference, launching a photography exhibit of her work at Science North.

“Probably if I didn’t have such a keen desire to communicate science in an intriguing way, and try to have art enfolded with it, I probably wouldn’t have taken all those risks. But hey, when you get to be my age, you kind of want to have a few things to brag about. A lot of adventures, every image has a story.”

The 77-year-old Bondar is best known as Canada’s first female astronaut after her 1992 space shuttle flight, but she also has a passion for wildlife photography.

Sudburians are able to see her photography exhibit “Patterns & Parallels: The Great Imperative,” free of charge in Science North’s lobby during business hours until Jan. 7, 2024.

The exhibit combines images from land, air and space (thanks to a partnership with NASA) to tell the story of migratory patterns of the whooping crane, lesser flamingo and piping plover species, which are all threatened or at risk of extinction.

‘It requires a lot of concentration’

Bondar expanded a bit more on the difficulty of taking photos from a helicopter when later questioned by Sudbury.com.

“It requires a lot of concentration, first of all, and a lot of trust between me and the pilot,” he said. “Granted, I was a private pilot, but I never flew helicopters, but I do understand pitch, roll and bank and yaw and all the things that are technically required in order to line a helicopter up to get the best artistic image that I wanted.

“So with a helicopter moving all the time, and being buffeted around, we also don’t want to scare birds. So we have to maintain a certain altitude. So any of the aerial shots are the most difficult ones to take.”

Even photos taken from the ground can be difficult to accomplish. 

“In some of the places in Africa it was 40-degrees centigrade, no air conditioning, we were there for days, nothing cold,” she said. “It was a very, very hot environment to work in to try to get these images of lesser flamingo.”

‘Such a special exhibit’ 

Science North senior scientist Amy Henson fan-girled a bit in introducing Bondar at the press conference, saying meeting her was a “12-year-old girl’s dream of mine,” because she was just 12 when Bondar went to space.

“This is such a special exhibit, and one of the greatest things about it is this perfect merge between science and art,” Henson told Sudbury.com.

“So everybody can appreciate beautiful imagery but the science story that Roberta is telling in this is impeccable — the story of several birds around our planet that are endangered species and the landscapes and the ecosystems that they live in. It’s stunning photography and we’re so excited to be able to host it here at Science North.”

Prior to travelling to Science North, Patterns & Parallels was launched and exhibited in Sault Ste. Marie, Bondar’s hometown. After its stay at Science North, it will then travel to other galleries, museums and science centres across Canada.

The exhibition features large, dramatic colour images taken by Bondar and selected NASA space images, as well as a video installation. 

QR codes at the exhibition create an interactive learning experience, allowing visitors access to digital learning opportunities including animations, audio from Bondar, and additional videos taken in the field.

A staggering three billion birds have disappeared from Canada and the United States since 1970, said press materials. The exhibition is a key part of the Roberta Bondar Foundation’s Space For Birds project, which uses photography as a tool to understand the biodiversity of nature and the impact of human actions and climate change on bird migration and habitat loss.

Exhibit took 10 years to accomplish 

“Now, many of you, in your lifetime may never see the piping plover, but it is the one that you might be able to see around the Great Lakes,” Bondar told those at the Science North press conference.

“There are only 200 of these birds left in the population by the Great Lakes. There’s another population in the Prairies and one in the East Coast. So it’s wonderful to be able to photograph these very, very rare species.”

She said the exhibit took her 10 years to be able to accomplish, and brought her not only to the United States and Canada, but the African countries Tanzania and Kenya. Bondar said she was on her way to Namibia to take photos when COVID-19 hit and she had to come home.

Bondar said she uses a lot of large (and very expensive) digital camera lenses to capture photos.

“I use the highest optical lenses that I can get, and basically the highest resolution sensors,” she said. “So from the helicopter, I’ve been using Hasselblad all digital, and on the ground, Nikon. I’ve now switched to completely mirrorless cameras on Nikon.”

Asked about her bird bucket list, Bondar said she is working on photographing a couple other endangered birds.

“One is called the red knot, and it is a fascinating bird,” she said. “It’s gray-colored in the winter down in the southern parts of the States and into Central America. And then it flies up through Delaware, changes its feathers to bright red,” and eventually migrates up to the Arctic.

“And that’s where it nests, as a lot of migratory birds do, because there are fewer predators,” Bondar said.

‘Our generation hasn’t done very well’ 

Sudbury biologist and Science North “bluecoat emeritus” Franco Mariotti said when he was a young teen and a “wanna-be biologist,” he sent away for a book on endangered species.

There were several thousand species listed in that book, but a United Nations report three years ago “stated that one million species face extinction,” Mariotti said. “Our generation hasn’t done very well to make a better world for this generation.”

He said Bondar’s photography work is important because she passionately articulates “how important and exciting these other living things are.
“Sometimes in the process, she will create wonder and awe about this planet, and that is what fuels restoration,” Mariotti said.

Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.