Like lovemaking, being photographed by one’s lover is an intimate, collaborative act. This is the subject matter explored by American photographer Kelli Connell in Pictures for Charis (pronounced care-iss). Over the past ten years, Connell researched and reconsidered the lives and relationship of writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston as Connell photographed her partner at the time, sculptor Betsy Odom. The exhibition explores themes of desire and inspiration by bringing together Connell’s photographs and Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes.

Using publications by Weston and Wilson as guides, Connell created portrait and landscape photographs at sites where Wilson and Weston lived, made art, and spent time together. Pictures for Charis juxtaposes those images with Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes 1934–45, one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson.

To preview the exhibition, we interviewed Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

To set the stage for those who aren’t familiar, can you explain the relationship between writer Wilson and photographer Weston?

Willowy nineteen-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 and led to the creation of masterworks: Weston considered his photographs of Wilson among his finest nudes.

Theirs was a working partnership. In addition to modeling for Weston, Wilson wrote articles, grant applications, and the text to accompany his photographic books. 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, quite a few of which are presented in this exhibition. The couple, who married in 1939, gradually grew apart and divorced in 1946.

Now, tell us about the relationship between photographer Connell and sculptor and curator Odom.

Connell uses photography to explore issues of self-perception and relationship dynamics. Her main interest in undertaking Pictures for Charis, her second major project, was Wilson and Weston’s relationship as photographer and subject, and how it related to her own relationship with her partner at the time, Odom. In the book that accompanies the exhibition, Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis, Connell wrote that her portraits of Odom explore “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.”

For Pictures for Charis, Odom not only agreed to be a model and muse but also to accompany Connell to some of the places where Weston and Wilson had lived and traveled. It was not always easy. “In rural towns,” wrote Connell, “we rarely feel relaxed among the locals. Betsy’s androgyny coupled with her baggy, boyish clothes, and me at her side, with our matching wedding bands, often sends an alert to the community, ‘Hey, fellow neighbors, gay city folk have walked in the door.’”

What do you think inspired Connell to carefully examine Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs of the Western landscape and the female nude?

Connell’s interest in Wilson and Weston was sparked by the gift, many years ago, of a postcard of Weston’s Floating Nude, from 1939 (the original photograph is on view in the show). “I immediately fell in love with the image on the postcard,” wrote Connell, “and maybe with Charis, or perhaps I just recognized something of myself in her.” Many years later, Connell decided to embark on this decade-long project of research and photography in part because she was curious about 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.”

Can these photographs be perceived as parallel love stories from two different perspectives? If so, how?
Absolutely—but from more than just two different perspectives. Connell worked collaboratively when she made her photographs of Odom, purposefully upending conventional power dynamics where the photographer exerts creative control over a passive sitter. She enriches our understanding of Weston and Wilson’s relationship from her contemporary Queer and feminist perspective. As she photographed her partner and the Western landscape, Connell notes, “this time, the images would be made by me, as a woman, photographer, partner.” It has been around eighty years since Weston made his photographs of the figure and the landscape. During the ensuing decades, attitudes toward both subjects have changed, impacted by changes in societal norms and threats to the land from urbanization, pollution, climate change, and other factors.

Was this body of work intended to pay homage or as an act of subversion?

I think it is intended as both an homage and a revision, but in no way a subversion of Weston’s art. Wilson wrote, “unlike a photograph, a life is not immutable once the person who lived it has died. The life is remade by those who remain. In article after article, I watched [Weston] . . . becoming a cliché-ridden myth created by people who had never known him.” Through the art forms used by Weston and Wilson—photography and literature—Connell responds to the canonization of Weston and the muting of Wilson’s voice. She brings them both back to life and restores their relationship back to a more accurate balance, using as a foil her own relationship with her partner and the landscape.

There’s a 75-year difference between the grand Western landscapes that Weston made iconic and Connell’s photographs. In what ways do you find these photos similar? What are their most distinct differences?

Weston and Connell share a profound reverence for the Western landscape. Weston’s views of those scenes became iconic and to a certain extent, romanticized the West. Of necessity, Connell’s images are raw and less idealized. As I mentioned above, our attitude toward the land and our knowledge of the changes our planet is experiencing have changed drastically since the 1930s, when the idea of Manifest Destiny and land as an inexhaustible resource still lingered from pioneer times.

Photographic materials and formats are also quite different now. Viewers may be shocked when they walk into the gallery and experience the difference in scale between Weston’s intimate, black-and-white gelatin silver prints, which sit on tables, and Connell’s large color and black-and-white inkjet prints, which hang on the wall.

What do you hope that visitors learn from seeing these two perspectives side-by-side?

We hope that these masterworks by Weston and Wilson and Connell and Odom encourage people to think about the similarities and differences between the male and female gaze, the heterosexual and feminist and Queer viewpoints, and the nature of relationships in the 1930s and now.

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis is on view January 26 through May 25, 2025, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries (230). The show is free; no ticket is required.

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
11150 East Boulevard
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
clevelandart.org
216.421.7350

EVENTS
Rose B. Simpson: Strata, through April 13, 2025, in the Ames Family Atrium

Arts of the Maghreb: North African Textiles and Jewelry, through October 12, 2025, in Arlene M. and Arthur S. Holden Gallery | Gallery 234

Picasso and Paper, December 8, 2024–March 23, 2025, in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery. Ticket required

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis, January 26–May 25, 2025, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries (230).

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, February 14–June 8, 2025, in the Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery | Gallery 010