ExhibitionsKelli Connell: Pictures for Charis

Current Exhibition

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis

September 20, 2024 – January 5, 2025

Tickets

Members and Museum Pass: Free
Not-Yet-Members: $23.50

Over the last ten years, American photographer Kelli Connell (born 1974) has researched the lives and relationship of writer Charis Wilson (American, 1914–2009) and photographer Edward Weston (American, 1886–1958). Using Wilson’s writing and Weston’s photographs as a guide, Connell traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together. With her partner at the time, Betsy Odom (born 1980), Connell retraced the couple’s explorations through the American West made some eighty years earlier to produce their landmark book California and the West (1940). Along the way, Connell collaboratively made photographs of Odom, upending conventional power dynamics where the photographer exerts creative control over a passive sitter.

This exhibition brings together Connell’s recent photographs with Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes made between 1934 and 1945. Throughout the exhibition, Connell’s and Wilson’s voices engage in dialogue with the original prints, guiding the visitor to consider how stories of an individual’s complex life are at risk of being flattened, generalized, or misremembered.

This exhibition includes text excerpts from the companion monograph Pictures for Charis by Kelli Connell and published by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography, 2024.

A portrait not only documents the likeness of someone at a particular time in a particular place, but it also records the photographer and model’s relationship to one another in that moment. Their combined energies are projected and preserved. The most captivating portraits contain an energy that is palpable—an intense desire or an active and revealing awkwardness that peels off a surface layer to show something raw underneath.

—Kelli Connell

Edward Weston (American, 1886–1958), Nude, 1936, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Edward Weston Archive/Gift of the Heirs of Edward Weston. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.

In taking up this quest, my main interest was in Charis and Edward’s relationship, as photographer and subject, and how it related to mine and Betsy’s. But I wondered, too, what it meant to be on the same side of the lens as Edward—to make portraits of Betsy and then landscape photographs in the places that he had, sometimes from precisely the same spot. This time, the images would be made by me, as a woman, photographer, partner. There was a weight to this project that I hadn’t fully come to terms with yet. Perhaps I could learn something from grappling with the tension between these different intentions.
—Kelli Connell

Kelli Connell (American, born 1974), Doorway II, 2015, pigmented inkjet print. © Kelli Connell.

After a most diligent hunt, we fail to find the right spot. Backtracking along the trail, I see magenta mountain pride growing at the base of a large boulder. This is not where the picture of Charis was taken, but somehow I feel that Charis had been here. Often, as Ansel [Adams], Ron [Partridge], and Edward photographed around the lake, Charis spent her time writing, sunbathing, or sleeping on the rocks. This rock has a large, flat surface easily heated by the sun, a perfect spot to lie down to sleep or read. I take a few portraits of Betsy.
—Kelli Connell

Kelli Connell (American, born 1974), Betsy, Lake Ediza, 2015, pigmented inkjet print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography, 2022.242.

Kelli Connell (American, born 1974), Artists Palette, 2015, pigmented inkjet print. © Kelli Connell.

Then, off in the distance, I see two junipers close to one another. The more petite of the two trees leans at an unfamiliar angle, so at first, I don’t believe that this is the pair we are seeking. But as I make my way to the other side of them, I know that these are the junipers in Edward’s photograph. [. . .] In an intense rush, I have the sensation that I am standing in the exact place where he had stood. [. . .] The junipers witnessed one of the most memorable and happy times in Charis and Edward’s life together. As Charis would later write, “This was the highlight of all our travels. I would have been happy to spend a month swimming, sleeping, observing wildlife, scaling the granite fastnesses (to my limited capacity), and encouraging Edward to find more reasons for lingering. Even now, I feel deprived that we spent only four days in that magnificent setting.”
—Kelli Connell

Kelli Connell (American, born 1974), Junipers, 2016, pigmented inkjet print. © Kelli Connell.

Edward Weston (American, 1886–1958), Juniper, Lake Tenaya, 1937, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Transfer from The University of Arizona Museum of Art. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.

In terms of natural setting, though, Ocean Home was an ideal place in which to grow up.
[. . .] The grounds [. . .] included an eight-foot-deep diving pool, where we learned to swim
[. . .]. Frogs in the swimming pool made a great echoing chorus at night, but now and again dead silence would fall and I’d lie in my bed, heart-still, wondering what they had heard.
—Charis Wilson

Edward Weston (American, 1886–1958), Floating Nude, 1939, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Edward Weston Archive. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.

Artistic practice is a form of research, a method of discovery for new knowledge.

Connell’s research began with the many books Charis Wilson and Edward Weston published in their lifetime and eventually expanded into a sustained exploration of their archives, which are housed at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. Connell had a broad goal in mind: to better understand Wilson and her role in relation to Weston. Over the next decade, as Connell broadened her understanding, she formulated next steps in her process, ultimately building her knowledge into this new body of portrait and landscape photographs and a book-length narrative of her travels with her former partner Betsy Odom.

The exhibition brings together many of Connell’s research materials, offered as an invitation to experience elements of her process. The materials include her notebooks, annotated facsimiles of documents and photographs from Wilson’s and Weston’s archives, and several books. They point to critical parts of Connell’s process and invite us to consider how she transformed information into knowledge and shaped that knowledge into artistic expression.

Watch the film below, produced by Carly Howard, the High’s Assistant Manager of Media Production, who traveled to Carmel, California, and Tucson, Arizona, in 2022 to film Kelli Connell in preparation for the exhibition.

Meet the Artists

Kelli Connell

American photographer Kelli Connell (born 1974) is based in Chicago, where she teaches at Columbia College Chicago. In her work, Connell explores issues of self-perception, the boundaries and boxes society places around identity, and relationship dynamics. For her second major project, Pictures for Charis, she researched Charis Wilson and Edward Weston and explored both their collaborative partnership and personal relationship. Using Weston’s photographs of Wilson as inspiration, Connell created works with her former partner, Betsy Odom, about the nature of relationships, historical perspectives, and the dynamics between photographer and model.

Image Credit: Kelli Connell, 2022. Photo by Natalie Krick.

Betsy Odom

American sculptor Betsy Odom (born 1980) has modeled for Kelli Connell and is both the inspiration for and subject of many of the works in Pictures for Charis. As Connell’s former partner, Odom helped Connell revisit and explore the relationship between Charis Wilson and Edward Weston while also interrogating and complicating traditional gender norms. Connell and Odom’s extensive travels are described in the companion book for this exhibition, Pictures for Charis, which includes an afterword by Odom. Odom teaches at Loyola University Chicago, and her artistic practice plays with stereotypical associations around gender and sexuality.

Image Credit: Betsy Odom, 2009. Photo by Kelli Connell.

Charis Wilson

Californian writer, photographer, and model Charis (CARE-iss) Wilson (1914–2009) was the daughter of novelist Harry Leon Wilson. She met Edward Weston in Carmel, California, in 1934, and soon after, they began a romantic relationship and working partnership. While Wilson gained recognition as the subject of Weston’s photographs, she also played the role of author, writing articles, grant applications, and the text to accompany Weston’s photographic books. Wilson’s writing recasts their partnership beyond their age difference and tropes of photographer and model. She published her memoir, Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston, in 1998.

Image Credit: Charis Wilson, 1941. Photo by Edward Weston, courtesy of Edward Weston Archive. © Center for Creative Photography.

Edward Weston

Modernist photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958) is known for landscapes of the American West, portraits, and still lifes that capture the aesthetic qualities of everyday objects. In 1929, he moved to Carmel and met Charis Wilson, who would become his second wife and a significant muse and collaborator in his work. Their relationship (1934–1946) marked the most productive and important phase of Weston’s career. In 1937, he was the first photographer to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him and Wilson to make work for their book California and the West (1940), the inspiration for Kelli Connell’s project.

Image Credit: Edward Weston, Carmel, 1945. Photo by Ansel Adams, courtesy of Ansel Adams Archive. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Reading Materials from artist Kelli Connell

Kelli Connell, Pictures for Charis (New York: Aperture, 2024).

Charis Wilson and Edward Weston, California and the West (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940).

Charis Wilson, Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).

Edward Weston, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman New York: Limited Editions Club, 1942.

Edward Weston, Nudes (New York: Aperture, 1977).

David Travis, Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001).

This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of The University of Arizona, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

A generous Foundation for Advancement in Conservation (FAIC)/Tru Vue® Conservation and Exhibition Grant and in-kind support of Optium Museum Acrylic® for preservation of this work was provided by Tru Vue, Inc. and Larson-Juhl.

Premier Exhibition Series Sponsor 

Premier Exhibition Series Supporters

Mr. Joseph H. Boland, Jr.

Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporters

Robin and Hilton Howell

Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters

Loomis Charitable Foundation
Mrs. Harriet H. Warren

Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters 

Farideh and Al Azadi
Mary and Neil Johnson
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones
Megan and Garrett Langley
Margot and Danny McCaul
Wade A. Rakes II and Nicholas Miller
Belinda Stanley-Majors and Dwayne Majors

Generous support is also provided by  

Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund, and USI Insurance Services.