Kali: Artography

An Introduction

Kali was a pioneer of alternative photography. She coined the term Artography to describe her painterly photographs, trademarking the name around 1967. Her lost archive spans five decades and contains three bodies of work—Portraits and Landscapes, Polaroids, and Outer Space.

Canyon and desert were the main environments of Kali, who, for the explosively productive years of her life—from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s—was, a secretive and therefore obscure master of the visual arts, hidden among the mostly conventional West L.A. housewives of her generation; the woody station wagon-driving car pool moms and the occasional white Mercedes-driving grandes dames, indigenous to the Southland canyons and the stylish desert cities of the 1960s and 1970s. Joan Archibald—or Kali, in the darkroom—turns out to have been one of the great chroniclers, and interpreters, of the waning twentieth-century years of her adopted hometown; a secret historian of the era we now know mostly from the heavily marketed triumphs of The Beach Boys, The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Joan Didion, and Shampoo.