Over the last ten years, American photographer Kelli Connell (born 1974) has researched the lives and relationship of writer Charis Wilson (American, 1914–2009) and photographer Edward Weston (American, 1886–1958). Using Wilson’s writing and Weston’s photographs as a guide, Connell traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together. With her partner at the time, Betsy Odom (born 1980), Connell retraced the couple’s explorations through the American West made some eighty years earlier to produce their landmark book California and the West (1940). Along the way, Connell collaboratively made photographs of Odom, upending conventional power dynamics where the photographer exerts creative control over a passive sitter.

This exhibition brings together Connell’s recent photographs with Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes made between 1934 and 1945. Throughout the exhibition, Connell’s and Wilson’s voices engage in dialogue with the original prints, guiding the visitor to consider how stories of an individual’s complex life are at risk of being flattened, generalized, or misremembered.

This exhibition includes text excerpts from the companion monograph Pictures for Charis by Kelli Connell and published by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography, 2024.

A portrait not only documents the likeness of someone at a particular time in a particular place, but it also records the photographer and model’s relationship to one another in that moment. Their combined energies are projected and preserved. The most captivating portraits contain an energy that is palpable—an intense desire or an active and revealing awkwardness that peels off a surface layer to show something raw underneath.

(Kelli Connell)