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A Psychedelic Portraitist Rediscovered

Kali’s “Debbie with Kitty Green #1” (1969). Courtesy of Staley-Wise Gallery and the Joan Archibald “Kali” photograph and papers collection from the Rose Library at Emory University

Kali’s “Young Boy” (1968). Courtesy of Staley-Wise Gallery and the Joan Archibald “Kali” photograph and papers collection from the Rose Library at Emory University

By Coralie Kraft

In the summer of 1962, having recently divorced at the age of 30, Joan Archibald left her two young children with her mother in Long Island and set out for the shores of Malibu, California. (“My mom needed to expand herself,” Archibald’s daughter Susan explained many years later.) There she shed her former life as a housewife, rebaptizing herself “Kali,” brushing shoulders with celebrities and photographing the scene around her. After moving into a house in Palm Springs with a pool, she began using it as a giant finishing bath for her photos, pouring various dyes and paints into it until she’d achieved the desired effects. Flooded with swirling, multilayered psychedelic hues, Kali’s portraits, often of wide-eyed young women, can feel like the ultimate distillation of an expansive, naïve and chaotic place and time. Despite her innovative techniques, her work has remained almost entirely unknown, but can now be seen in a new volume, “Kali,” by Powerhouse Books. $175, powerhousebooks.com.