MidwestPhoto Festival 2024 and FlakPhoto Projects present photographer Kelli Connell, who will discuss her photobook, Pictures for Charis, a groundbreaking new work that synthesizes text and image while raising vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century, on Saturday, September 28, 2024, 11:00am to 12:30pm in the first floor Performance Gallery. Following the lecture, Kelli will sign copies of her book. Free admission.
Pictures for Charis (Aperture & Center for Creative Photography, March 2024) 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 partner, Betsy Odom, to locales where the latter couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. Wilson wrote extensively about her travels and 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 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 rich weave of narrative and images complicates and breathes new life into a well-known set of photos while also presenting Connell's entirely new and mesmerizing body of work, her first work combining image and text as a mode of visual research and storytelling.
