THE first time she modelled for Edward Weston, in March 1934, Charis Wilson knew she didn’t look good. At 20 she was “a piece of jailbait”, a mere child, especially with the stumpy plaits into which she sometimes twisted her hair. She was a drifter, moving in a miasma of angry despair in and out of speakeasies and other people’s beds because her father had refused to let her go to college, even though she’d won a full scholarship to Sarah Lawrence, and even though he would certainly have let her brother go. There was nothing to do but work in her mother’s dress shop, sleep around in San Francisco, get pregnant, have an abortion. She had taken a solemn vow of chastity since then, like one of her made-up childhood rituals of lying in freezing cold water, but to someone with her natural generosity it was a heartless, bitter thing. She looked pale, her chin jutting out in defiance and her whole face needing something—like warts on her nose, her mother told her—to make it remotely interesting.
But none of this seemed to matter to the short, long-faced, middle-aged man who was now behind the focusing cloth, clattering the shutter furiously in tenth-of-a-second bursts, to take her picture. It was obvious to her as soon as they had met, some weeks before—Weston’s eyes meeting hers across the crowd at a concert, looking away, looking back again—that he missed nothing. His career as one of America’s greatest photographers was already taking shape. He was busy now recording separate fragments of her, a knee, a shin, a shoulder, her arms. But in the repeated curve of her thigh and calf he saw shapes like sea shells, with the luminescence and faint muscular rays of the great chambered nautilus. Her torso, outlined in light, was like the trunk of a cypress tree just entering the soil. Her skin, every follicle and flaw in focus in the ground glass of his lens, had the same sun- and sea-wind weathering, but fainter, of the stones of the Californian desert, and her hips had the convolutions of the naked mountains. To him she was a landscape.
She was not an exhibitionist, or not much of one, though she had scandalised her Aunt Allie by sunbathing naked on the deck of the big family house at Carmel, and it had been easy to take off her clothes for Edward. He didn’t direct her, or put her in a pose—she hated those anyway, couldn’t hold them, preferred to lie down comfortably with a book. He just let her move as she liked, in a sort of slow motion until he stopped her; and she waited, almost floating, as when she used to swim out from Carmel to the kelp beds and tie her bathing suit to a stalk and lie there, her white arms—as Edward now saw them—as sinuous and exquisite as the kelp itself.
The lines of Nature
He could be brutally direct about his nudes, who were also always his lovers, talking about “doing” backs, buttocks, heads as though they were lifeless bits of stone. It seemed that he could feel as much passion for a pepper, in the dimpled line of its spine and its cushioned, fleshy base, as for any young woman. Charis he found different, both more beautiful than the others and perhaps “the great love of my life”. His finest nudes, he thought, were done with her. He had achieved “certain heights reached with no other love”.
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He had also met his match in her. Both of them wanted sex as much as photography, and said so candidly. Everything they did in the 11 burning years they were together was good collaborative work, at least as far as she was concerned. The notion of a muse was nonsense to her, a passive thing. She knew exactly what she was doing—how furniture framed her or shadows fell, how her knee or shoulder would look turned just so, or what a good idea it would be to run and roll naked down the giant sand dunes at Oceano, a small part of that infinite, flowing unity of all forms that he was always looking for.
Soon she knew his ideas well enough to write the text for his photographs, his applications for grants and his articles for photographic magazines, for words came easily to her as they never did to him. She took the notes, on her clackety Royal typewriter, and also drove their puttering Ford on the giant western trips they made in the late 1930s; the books that resulted, notably “California and the West”, were as much hers as his, but she was seldom credited. In the end, this rankled. Though she felt she had pulled even with him, he never saw her that way or gave her writing equal space with his pictures. The grand romance cooled and in 1946 died, giving way to ordinary life.
She never saw the photographs, now kept at the Centre for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, without a sense of shock at how beautiful they were. Of course, she knew the stories behind them: how a sensationally sexy picture of her at Lake Ediza in California, fully clothed but knees splayed apart, was mostly about exhaustion and trying to keep the mosquitoes off; or how her bowed head in “Nude” (1936), shown here, was turned away only because the sun from the white deck was dazzling her. In that picture she was always sorry for the clumsy pins, and the uneven parting in her hair. But Edward Weston regretted the shadow on her right arm, which spoiled the symmetry of her body curving like an architectural form or a tree, or like a curling wave on the coast, lines as lovely as any in Nature. To her lasting astonishment, he had glorified her.
But none of this seemed to matter to the short, long-faced, middle-aged man who was now behind the focusing cloth, clattering the shutter furiously in tenth-of-a-second bursts, to take her picture. It was obvious to her as soon as they had met, some weeks before—Weston’s eyes meeting hers across the crowd at a concert, looking away, looking back again—that he missed nothing. His career as one of America’s greatest photographers was already taking shape. He was busy now recording separate fragments of her, a knee, a shin, a shoulder, her arms. But in the repeated curve of her thigh and calf he saw shapes like sea shells, with the luminescence and faint muscular rays of the great chambered nautilus. Her torso, outlined in light, was like the trunk of a cypress tree just entering the soil. Her skin, every follicle and flaw in focus in the ground glass of his lens, had the same sun- and sea-wind weathering, but fainter, of the stones of the Californian desert, and her hips had the convolutions of the naked mountains. To him she was a landscape.
She was not an exhibitionist, or not much of one, though she had scandalised her Aunt Allie by sunbathing naked on the deck of the big family house at Carmel, and it had been easy to take off her clothes for Edward. He didn’t direct her, or put her in a pose—she hated those anyway, couldn’t hold them, preferred to lie down comfortably with a book. He just let her move as she liked, in a sort of slow motion until he stopped her; and she waited, almost floating, as when she used to swim out from Carmel to the kelp beds and tie her bathing suit to a stalk and lie there, her white arms—as Edward now saw them—as sinuous and exquisite as the kelp itself.
The lines of Nature
He could be brutally direct about his nudes, who were also always his lovers, talking about “doing” backs, buttocks, heads as though they were lifeless bits of stone. It seemed that he could feel as much passion for a pepper, in the dimpled line of its spine and its cushioned, fleshy base, as for any young woman. Charis he found different, both more beautiful than the others and perhaps “the great love of my life”. His finest nudes, he thought, were done with her. He had achieved “certain heights reached with no other love”.
Click here
He had also met his match in her. Both of them wanted sex as much as photography, and said so candidly. Everything they did in the 11 burning years they were together was good collaborative work, at least as far as she was concerned. The notion of a muse was nonsense to her, a passive thing. She knew exactly what she was doing—how furniture framed her or shadows fell, how her knee or shoulder would look turned just so, or what a good idea it would be to run and roll naked down the giant sand dunes at Oceano, a small part of that infinite, flowing unity of all forms that he was always looking for.
Soon she knew his ideas well enough to write the text for his photographs, his applications for grants and his articles for photographic magazines, for words came easily to her as they never did to him. She took the notes, on her clackety Royal typewriter, and also drove their puttering Ford on the giant western trips they made in the late 1930s; the books that resulted, notably “California and the West”, were as much hers as his, but she was seldom credited. In the end, this rankled. Though she felt she had pulled even with him, he never saw her that way or gave her writing equal space with his pictures. The grand romance cooled and in 1946 died, giving way to ordinary life.
She never saw the photographs, now kept at the Centre for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, without a sense of shock at how beautiful they were. Of course, she knew the stories behind them: how a sensationally sexy picture of her at Lake Ediza in California, fully clothed but knees splayed apart, was mostly about exhaustion and trying to keep the mosquitoes off; or how her bowed head in “Nude” (1936), shown here, was turned away only because the sun from the white deck was dazzling her. In that picture she was always sorry for the clumsy pins, and the uneven parting in her hair. But Edward Weston regretted the shadow on her right arm, which spoiled the symmetry of her body curving like an architectural form or a tree, or like a curling wave on the coast, lines as lovely as any in Nature. To her lasting astonishment, he had glorified her.