CHARIS WILSON (1914–2009)
Charis Wilson, who was lover, muse, model, amanuensis, and wife of the photographer Edward Weston and the subject of many of his best-known nude portraits, died on Friday in Santa Cruz, California, according to the New York Times. She was ninety-five.
In January 1934, Wilson was an intellectually inclined, brazenly adventurous young woman of nineteen when she met Weston, who was then in his late forties, at a concert in Carmel, California They were drawn to each other instantly, and she began posing for him shortly thereafter.
By the following year they were living together; they married in 1939 and separated in 1945, divorcing the following year.
“I knew I really didn’t look that good, and that Edward had glorified me,” Wilson said later, as recounted in The Model Wife, a 1999 study by Arthur Ollman of nine photographers and their images of their wives, “but it was a very pleasant thing to be glorified and I couldn’t wait to go back for more.”
During their eleven years together, Wilson wrote the grant application that earned Weston a Guggenheim Fellowship—he was the first photographer to receive one—and she drove the car during his explorations of the West. Ollman credited Wilson with actually writing the articles for photography magazines that were attributed to Weston.
And of course she inspired his art, becoming the literal embodiment of her husband’s aesthetic—elegant, simple, fiercely intimate, and glowingly sensual, with shadow and light beautifully in balance—as it applied to the female form. He photographed her clothed and unclothed, indoors and out, and many of his images of her—espied through a window, frolicking on sand dunes, floating in a pool, posed with her face hidden and her limbs complexly entwined—are among his most enduring.
