Pictures for Charis
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
American photographer Kelli Connell (born 1974) is based in Chicago, where she teaches at Columbia College Chicago. In her work, Connell has explored issues of self-perception and relationship dynamics. In her second major project—presented here—she researched Charis Wilson and Edward Weston, and by picturing her relationship with her former partner Betsy Odom, created new works about the nature of relationships, history, and perspective.
Image Credit: Kelli Connell, 2022. Photo by Natalie Krick.
American sculptor Betsy Odom (born 1980) has modeled for Kelli Connell and is both the inspiration for and subject in many of the works in this exhibition. Odom’s career also includes curatorial work and teaching at Loyola University Chicago. Connell and Odom’s extensive travels as a married couple are described in the companion book for this exhibition, Pictures for Charis, which also includes an afterword by Odom.
Image Credit: Betsy Odom, 2009. Photo by Kelli Connell.
Californian writer and model Charis (CARE-iss) Wilson (1914–2009) was the daughter of Harry Leon Wilson, a popular novelist of the early twentieth century, and Helen Charis Cook Wilson, for whom she was named. She met Edward Weston in Carmel, California, in 1934, and soon after they began a romantic relationship. This eventually became a working partnership in which Wilson both modeled for Weston and wrote articles, grant applications, and the text to accompany photographic books, including the groundbreaking California and the West (1940). Following their 1946 divorce, Wilson married a labor activist, Noel Harris, and raised two daughters. In 1977, she wrote the foreword to a book of Weston’s nudes and in 2007 was the subject of a documentary film Eloquent Nude. 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.
American modernist photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958) was born in Illinois but is closely associated with California. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man, where he met his first wife, Flora Chandler, and established a photography studio. In 1929, he moved to Carmel, and it was there, in 1934, that he met Charis Wilson, who would become his second wife, and spent the last twenty-nine years of his life. 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). Weston is known for portraits, landscapes, still lifes of peppers and shells, and nudes, including those of romantic partners Tina Modotti, Margrethe Mather, Sonya Noskowiak, and Charis Wilson.
Image Credit: Edward Weston, Carmel, 1945. Photo by Ansel Adams, courtesy of Ansel Adams Archive. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.