Photographer Jo Ann Chaus first photographed herself in 2013. From that moment on, self-portraiture became her primary tool, and Unspoken, published by Kehrer Verlag and out this July, is the book where everything converges.

The book brings together self-portraits, still lifes, landscapes and domestic interiors that Chaus inhabits and observes with equal intensity. Her images are meticulously constructed: dramatic colours inspired by the New Color Photography movement, 1950s dresses worn as costumes, light used to reveal rather than flatter. As gallerist and curator Debra Klomp Ching writes, Chaus’s photographs are «at once intimate, and yet laid bare for all to see».

The reference to the 1950s takes us back to the women of that era, confined to the roles of lover, muse, mother, housekeeper. These are both Chaus’s starting point and the critical target of her work. She wears those roles literally, puts them on like costumes, then steps back and observes them from the outside. Photographer and writer Allen Frame describes this process as the exploration of «a kaleidoscope repertoire of personas», work that speaks of «the complexities of balancing regrets about the past with the capacity for profound creative self-realization in the present».

What strikes you looking at these images is the constant tension between exposure and withdrawal. A figure holding a magnifying glass where her face should be. A bare back in a dark attic. A green velvet armchair bearing the imprint of an absent body. Chaus doesn’t show herself to be seen: she shows herself to understand herself. As she puts it: «The act of photographing was instrumental in breaking free from these gendered confines and allowing myself to become unstuck, unconstrained, and to express myself, unencumbered.»

Unspoken is a book about what has gone unsaid for too long. And about what happens when you finally say it.

© Jo Ann Chaus / Kehrer Verlag