Betsy, Lake Ediza

Kelli Connell is best known for her contemplative, narrative photographs that challenge norms of gender and sexuality and conventional understandings of the photographer/sitter relationship. In Pictures for Charis, she reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston. Over several years, Connell and her wife, Betsy, retraced the routes Weston and Wilson traveled in the late 1930s while making a book that featured Weston’s photographs and text by Wilson. Traveling to locations where Wilson and Weston spent time together, Connell collaboratively made photographs featuring Betsy within grand Western landscapes and in intimate domestic spaces.