CHARIS WILSON: Iconic Model In Nude Photography, Dead At 95 ...
Palin'sAnusRimmer
photography text.
----------------
"Model for husband, photographer Edward Weston"
By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
CHARIS WILSON, the model for some of the most haunting and intimate
images created by her husband, groundbreaking photographer Edward
Weston, died Nov. 20 in Santa Cruz, Calif., at age 95. The cause of
death was not reported.
Ms. Wilson was two weeks shy of her 20th birthday when she met the 48-
year-old Weston at a concert in Carmel, Calif., in 1934. He was struck
at once by her lissome beauty: "I saw this tall, beautiful girl, with
finely proportioned body, intelligent face, well-freckled, blue eyes,
golden brown hair to shoulders -- and had to meet," he wrote in his
diary.
Within weeks, she was posing for Weston, who was well known for his
striking photographs of landscapes, nudes and luxuriantly detailed
vegetables. He was considered the leading practitioner of "straight"
or "hard-edged" photography, which is known for its sharp, vivid
focus, stark lighting contrasts and minimal distortion.
Many of Weston's photographs of Ms. Wilson showed her in the nude,
lying amid sand dunes, floating in a pool of water or curled into near-
abstract shapes. He seldom asked her to adopt a particular pose,
preferring to capture her natural movements. The erotically charged
pictures were recognized as something new and remarkable in
photography.
"There are pictures that he took of her that burn themselves into your
mind," Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National
Gallery of Art, said Tuesday.
Describing an image of Ms. Wilson facedown in a California sand dune,
artist Charles Sheeler wrote in 1936, "If there is a more beautiful
photograph of the human figure anywhere, I haven't seen it."
Despite her youth, Ms. Wilson had few inhibitions when she met Weston.
"Back then we thought a sun bath was the healthiest thing you could
do," she said in 1990. "I'd whip off my clothes whenever possible."
Weston, who was married with four sons, had a long history of romantic
attachments to his models.
"He was magnetic," Ms. Wilson said. "If there had been groupies in
those days, he would have had them. . . . It's amusing, though, that
he gets credit for leading a scandalous life, right up to being a sex
maniac. Fact is, it took me a lot of work to seduce him."
While continuing to pose for Weston's camera, Ms. Wilson moved in with
Weston and helped with his studio. She wrote much of the application
that won Weston a Guggenheim fellowship in 1937, the first awarded to
a photographer. With the $2,000 fellowship, they bought a car and
traveled throughout the West, with Ms. Wilson behind the wheel. They
married in 1939.
In the early 1940s, she wrote many of the essays that bore Weston's
name and came to be regarded as seminal descriptions of his work. They
separated in 1945 and were divorced in 1946 -- the same year Weston
had his first major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
He died of Parkinson's disease in 1958.
Ms. Wilson remarried and had two daughters but remained loyal to the
memory of Weston and the art they created together.
"I thought of myself as a sophisticated woman of the world," she said
in her 1998 autobiography written with Wendy Madar. But, after meeting
Weston, "I learned how limited all my previous experience had been, as
what had always seemed to me to be a branch of playacting became
unmistakably real."
Helen Charis Wilson was born May 5, 1914, in San Francisco. She
dropped her first name and went by Charis, pronounced with a hard "k"
and rhyming with "Harris." Her father, Harry Leon Wilson, was the
author of "Ruggles of Red Gap," a novel about an English butler in the
American West that was made into a 1935 film starring Charles
Laughton. Her father and mother were 45 and 16, respectively, when
they married.
Ms. Wilson attended private schools in California and Oregon and had a
scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College, which her father would not
allow her to accept. In rebellion, she moved to San Francisco and led
a bohemian life before meeting Weston.
Her second marriage, to union organizer Noel Harris, ended in divorce.
A daughter from that marriage is her lone survivor.
In recent years, as Weston gained critical acceptance as one of the
century's greatest photographers, Ms. Wilson often gave lectures about
his life and work. She was featured in a 2007 documentary, "Eloquent
Nude: The Love and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson."
"What we shared," she said, "was indestructible."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/24/AR2009112403885.html