Desire and Inspiration

“I was utterly happy to be the subject and to feel I had been made into a work of art,” said writer Charis (pronounced care-iss) Wilson about being photographed by her lover Edward Weston. “Kel’s impulse to make portraits of me was an expression of love, as was my willingness to be portrayed,” wrote artist Betsy Odom about being photographed by her partner Kelli Connell.

Like making love, being photographed by one’s lover is an intimate, collaborative act. This is the territory explored by Connell in Pictures for Charis. Using publications by Weston and Wilson as a guide, Connell and Odom created portrait and landscape photographs at sites where Wilson and Weston had lived, made art, and spent time together. This exhibition juxtaposes those images with Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes made between 1934 and 1945, one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson.
Willowy 19-year-old Wilson met the short, balding, and vivacious 48-year-old Weston in 1934 at a concert in Carmel, California. She offered to model for him. While Wilson made the first romantic move, the attraction was mutual and electric. Their passion led to the creation of masterworks: Weston considered his photographs of Wilson among his finest nudes.

In 1936, Weston received the first Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, which supported two years of photographing around the American West. Wilson helped plan their trips, did all the driving, occasionally modeled, and chronicled their travels. This collaboration yielded the now-classic photobook California and the West, which contains Wilson’s text and some of Weston’s most revered images. 

Over the ensuing decades, Weston was acclaimed as one of America’s modern masters. His fame eclipsed Wilson’s contributions, muting her voice. In this exhibition and its accompanying book, Connell reconsiders the couple’s relationship and gives Wilson her due. By interweaving the stories of Wilson and Weston with those of Connell’s own relationship with Odom, her partner at the time, Connell also enriches our understanding of the couple from her contemporary Queer and feminist perspective. 

“When I first started making portraits of Betsy,” wrote Connell, “I was interested in exploring . . . our experiences as a couple, my attraction to her androgyny—and to questioning, through my photographs, societal expectations about gender and beauty and the roles that we perform within these constructs.” When Connell started the project on Weston and Wilson, she wanted to see how their relationship as photographer and subject related to hers with Odom. What did it mean, she wondered, “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.”

Connell spent 10 years working on the Pictures for Charis exhibition and its companion monograph. What, if any, are the similarities and differences between the male and female gaze, the heterosexual and feminist and Queer viewpoints, the nature of relationships in the 1930s and now? Come discover these masterworks by Weston and Wilson, and Connell and Odom, and decide for yourself.