A Contemporary Photographer's Response to Edward Weston

Two love stories separated by 80 years. Two photographers. Two models.

Kelli Connell (b. 1974) brings them together during “Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis,” an exhibition on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where admission is free, through May 25, 2025.

Charis (pronounced CARE-iss) is Charis Wilson (1914–2009). As is often the case for women in art history with famous partners, Wilson’s contributions as writer, model, champion, and right hand woman have generally been reduced to that of muse. Research Wilson online and nearly every story, including her obituary, which ran in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune, refer to her by the “m” word.

Wilson was a bright, beautiful, vivacious, 19-year-old woman when she met 48-year-old Edward Weston (1886–1958) in Carmel, CA in 1934. The two would immediately embark on an intimate personal and professional relationship lasting until 1945. During their time together, Wilson would feature in more than half of Weston’s nude photographs, many taken in the Western landscape.

‘Charis Wilson,’ 1941. Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958). Gelatin silver print; 4 916 x 3 58 in. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Edward Weston Archive. Copyright Center for Creative

These images would become iconic. Among them, Floating Charis (1939).

Connell received a postcard featuring the image, sending her on a decade-long journey of researching Wilson, and Wilson’s relationship with Weston. Thoroughly captivated, Connell began visiting many of the same locations where Weston photographed Wilson, in California and around the West – Ediza and Tenya lakes in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, Point Lobos, Big Sur, Carmel, Santa Fe – responding to those images by shooting pictures on site of her then-partner Besty Odom.

“Pictures for Charis” juxtaposes 25 of Connell’s photographs with 45 classic figure studies and Western landscapes by Weston from 1934 to 1945, one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson.

Why “Pictures for Charis?”

“Anybody who studies photography as (Connell) had and is a working artist in photography is aware of Weston; he's one of the great American masters, and so she wondered about the role of Charis,” Barbara Tannenbaum, Curator of Photography, Chair of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Cleveland Museum of Art, said. “After (Weston’s) death, especially, he became incredibly famous. Wilson's role was diminished, her contributions were forgotten to a certain extent. Kelli wanted to bring her voice back closer to the forefront and give her more equal status.”

Status beyond muse.

Status she earned.

When Weston first applied for the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, he was denied. When Wilson rewrote and resubmitted his application in 1936, it was accepted, making Weston the first photographer to receive the award. In that same year, Weston began his series of nudes and sand dunes taken in Oceano, CA, generally considered a high point of his career.

“She wrote the text that goes along with the pictures in ‘California and the West’ which is acclaimed as one of the great American photo books” Tannenbaum explained. “She traveled with him and worked on the itinerary together with him. She drove. She had to drive him. (Weston) didn't drive.”

In addition to modeling and helping orchestrate the photographs of her.

‘Juniper, Lake Tenaya,’ 1937. Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958). Gelatin silver print; 9.5 x 7 716 in. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Transfer from The University of Arizona Museum

“If you're a photographer, especially if you're going to photograph the landscape, which has been Kelli’s area before this project, it's very hard to escape (Weston’s) influence, especially if you're going to the West and photographing the same places,” Tannenbaum said. “He's a very loud voice for anyone who's going to be doing landscape photography, and anybody who's learning photography, he is one of the great American masters. Kelli had to escape his orbit, pull away from his orbit.”

Connell did so by focusing on Wilson, and Wilson’s relationship with Weston, and Connell’s own relationship with Odom. Not only as lovers, but the photographer-model relationship Connell has long been fascinated by.

“Kelli decided to go to some of the same places that (Wilson and Weston) were photographing and see how it felt to work with Betsy, but perhaps in a relationship that was more equal in terms of a collaboration, as opposed to the photographer photographing the model,” Tannenbaum said. “The relationship between model and photographer, between partners in the 1930s, is very different than the way we conceive of it now.”

Wilson was no wallflower. She has agency in both the pictures and her relationship with Weston. Despite what their age difference may suggest, it was she who first approached him. Tannenbaum even considers Weston a “feminist” for his day, although that term did not exist at the time.

Still, in that era, the model/photographer, female/male power dynamic was less equitable than now.

Connell puts an additional contemporary spin on her images of Odom.

“The two love stories, one from a very heterosexual, male point of view in the 30s, and then you have Kelli working with her partner in the 2010s and 2020s, so you have a queer feminist point of view,” Tannenbaum explained. “Weston was known for his Western landscapes and for the nude in the Western landscape and making that analogy or equivalence between the female body and the landscape. (In Connell’s photographs) there's a different mood. If you look at (pictures) of Charis’ body in the Western landscape and if you look at some of the photographs of Betsy’s body, they're different. They have a slightly different feel to them.”

‘Betsy, Lake Ediza,’ 2015. Kelli Connell (American, b. 1974). Inkjet print; 40 x 50 in. Copyright Kelli Connell.

Odom had significant input into how she wanted to be seen and what poses she would assume. Some closely echo Wilson’s, others not at all.

Following its run in Cleveland, the exhibition wraps up at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson which houses Weston’s archive negatives and papers and Wilson’s papers as well. Weston’s archival documents read like a who’s who of 20^th century art. He met, worked, or was friends with luminaries including Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and the three greats of Mexican muralism – Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco – from when he lived and worked in Mexico City.

Amazing.

“Pictures with Charis” does nothing to diminish Weston’s rightly deserved place in art history.

“(Weston) brings a majesty and also a level of formal abstraction underlaying the landscape photograph. They're very declarative, strong images that seem kind of inevitable in a way,” Tannenbaum said. “They're so beautifully constructed and so carefully balanced in terms of the gray scale from black and white, and they give you that character of the American West, the pureness of the wilderness. When you see the dunes, there's no footsteps, it's all empty and perfect, just this amazing flow of curves of sand. The horizon’s very high in some of those photographs, and you have the sense of endless sand. Many of the places that he photographed, for instance Yosemite, already had a very active tourist trade and camping trade, but you don't see that in his photos.”

Connell’s Western landscape photos are much less idealized.

Wilson and Weston’s, as well as Connell and Odom’s, romantic relationships would both end. Wilson went on to write a memoir about her time with Weston published in 1998.