Aperture is pleased to release a limited-photograph by Kelli Connell on the occasion of the publication Pictures for Charis (2024), copublished by the Center for Creative Photography. Doorway II is a work featured on the cover of Pictures for Charis, and part of the series driven by photographer Connell’s fascination with Charis Wilson, the writer and collaborator of Edward Weston, as well as Weston’s partner and model. Connell focuses on the life of Charis Wilson and the time she spent with Weston from 1934 to 1945. Guided by Wilson’s autobiography, Through Another Lens: My Life with Edward Weston and California and the West, a collaborative work by Wilson and Weston, Connell and her partner Betsy Odom traversed diverse California landscapes, working in the places where Wilson and Weston once lived and worked eighty years ago. Wilson wrote extensively about her travels and about her and Weston’s photographic concerns. Following in this regard, 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 many of the same thorny issues regarding the nature of desire and inspiration, and the relationship of artist and landscape. This image is a homage to one of Weston’s iconic photographs of Wilson, Nude, 1936, which was taken on the deck of their bedroom in California in 1936. In Connell’s contemporary interpretation, photographing her partner in a similar pose, the roles of Wilson and Weston are intertwined with their own. Pictures of Charis explores the dynamics of photographer-to-sitter relationships and serves at once as an homage to Charis Wilson and a backdrop to raise questions about gender, sexuality, and relationships in the twenty-first century. Proceeds from the sale of this print directly support the artist and Aperture's nonprofit publishing, educational and public programs.
