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, model, 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 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.
Kelli Connell (born in Oklahoma City, 1974) is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity, and photographer/sitter relationships. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others. Connell has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work, and the Center for Creative Photography. Connell is 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, Illinois Arts Council Artist Grant, and a West collection acquisition prize. Odom's work has been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Fabrik magazine, and the Chicago Tribune.
