Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis

Pictures for Charis offers a groundbreaking new work by artist Kelli Connell, synthesizing text and image, while raising vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century. Pictures for Charis is a project driven by photographer Kelli Connell’s obsession with the writer Charis Wilson, Edward Weston’s partner, muse, and collaborator during one of the most productive segments of his historic career. Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locales where the latter couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. Wilson wrote extensively about her travels and about her, and Weston’s, photographic concerns. In chasing Charis Wilson’s ghost, Connell tells her own story, one that finds a kinship with Wilson and, to her surprise, Weston, too, as she navigates her own life and struggles as an artist against a cultural landscape that has changed and yet remains mired in the many of the same thorny issues regarding the nature of desire and inspiration, and the relationship of artist, muse, and landscape. This rich weave of narrative and images complicates and breathes new life into a well-known set of photos, while also presenting an entirely new and mesmerizing body of work by Connell, her first work combining image and text as a mode of visual research and storytelling. Copublished by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson