Pictures for Charis offers a 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 partner Betsy Odom to
the same locales where Wilson and Weston made now-iconic 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 a queer female 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, 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 project combining image and text as a mode of visual research and storytelling.
Kelli Connell (born Oklahoma City, 1974) is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity and photographer/sitter relationships. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and MacDowell. She is currently an editor at SKYLARK Editions and a professor at Columbia College Chicago.
Betsy Odom is an artist, curator, and educator based in Chicago. They received an MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. They are the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a DCASE Grant, and a West collection acquisition prize. Odom’s work has been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Fabrik magazine, and the Chicago Tribune.
Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
Aperture
Photographs and text by Kelli Connell
Afterword by Betsy Odom
Design by Emily Anderson
7 3/4 x 9 1/8 in. (20 x 23.1 cm)
280 pages
109 duotone and four-color images Clothbound
ISBN 978-1-59711-559-9
US $65.00 / CDN $88.00 / UK £57.00
www.aperture.org
Copublished by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson
Exhibition Schedule:
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, February 17–August 10, 2024
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, September 2024 – January 2025
The Cleveland Art Museum, January – May 2025
