Charis Wilson: Meeting with a Muse

Santa Cruz CA–(June 12 2005)

photo /Adrian Mendoza)

         The graceful hands that wave in the air like tall grass are still there; likewise the endless legs and fair hair now whitened by time. Even in a wheelchair, Charis Wilson Weston, 91, is what you would call “a tall drink of water.” Those blue eyes still look at you with that direct, reflective gaze seen in the famous portraits taken 60, 70 years ago by American photographer Edward Weston, to whom she was married for 11 intensely creative years.

         I had been working on screenplay about Edward Weston and his previous muse, Tina Modotti, and by chance learned that Charis, who came into his life in a later period, was still alive and living in Santa Cruz, California.  Weston, one of the pioneers of photographic modernism, died in 1958. But Charis, a living link to the famous photographer and some of his essential work, is serenely present when I find her in the sunny cottage  she shares with her daughter,  Rachel Fern Harris, and son-in-law. Numerous cats and free-range chickens picking through the gardens engage her adoring attention frequently throughout our chat.

         “That cell phone ring you keep hearing around here?” she says without prior greeting. “It’s a mocking bird! Bird picked up the sound of Rachel’s cell phone!”

         Born in San Francisco in 1914, Charis grew up among the Bohemian aristocracy of 1920s Carmel. She was nearly 20 when she met the 48-year-old Weston, and she married him at 25.  His nude 1930s and ‘40s photographs of her sprawling in the sand, floating on water, and around the house in Carmel, establish their shared membership in an avant garde vision that was liberated from both moralism and glamour. In them she is supremely comfortable in her own body, an unapologetic child of nature, neither shy nor seductive. This was her charm, and the power of it stuns viewers of the photos even today.

         They traveled the U.S. on a Guggenheim Foundation grant, producing the book “California and the West,” with Weston’s photographs and text by Charis.  She wrote essays articulating Weston’s ideas about photography, and collaborated on their book “The Cats of Wildcat Hill.” But Charis sought a wider range as a writer, and greater freedom to develop her own identity. The Westons divorced in 1946, and she moved to northern California to take part in the labor movement. She married a labor activist, raised their two daughters, worked at a variety of jobs, and at the age of 53, moved on, alone again, to write children’s books and teach creative writing. She suffered the loss of her 19-year-old daughter, Anita, to violence.

         Charis is curious to meet me and does not seem to mind if I question her about her ex-husband, posing nude, or the women in his past. My first question: Does she consider herself to have been a collaborator in the creation of Weston’s portraits of her?

            “No,” she asserts. “I always thought that photography was ‘his thing,’ and that what I did was writing.”

         Apart from Flora [Chandler, his first wife], she says, “I was probably the only one of his women who didn’t want to follow in his footsteps.”

             She describes herself in her 20s as having been “totally taken with him as a man and very rapidly, as a lover, and a unique human being. Photography just came along with it. And as it was ‘his thing,’ it seemed important to me to help him say what he wanted to say, because he wasn’t good at self-expression through writing. And I always knew that I was.”

         Another example she did not comfortably follow was Weston’s presumption of sexual freedom, although she had believed in it prior to meeting him. In her 1998 autobiography, “Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston,” she writes that although she struggled with it,  “I finally figured out that my obligations to Edward included marital fidelity.” 

         Yet Weston’s “smoldering jealousy” for the male attention showered on his young wife was a source of conflict.  It helped her to understand what his previous muse, Tina Modotti, had experienced when she rejected his double standard of sexual behavior, an attitude which absolutely “tore him to pieces,” Charis says.

          “The few times he was jealous of me, I could see what absolutely  unreasoning proportions this jealousy took, just because someone else had a hankering for me, and not that I was doing anything. I did think of Tina at the time – you know: what the men were doing was the problem.”

            Mostly Charis learned to ignore or just field it. But relationships tend to have another face after 60 years of reflection.

            “I think more and more about how specifically male dominant all of his views were and it’s a wonder to me, in retrospect, that I took all this so calmly.”

          At the same time, she sees now that, “Edward had so many good qualities: an appreciation of tenderness, his outgoingness, even his willingness to share cooking and housework, all the things that I hadn’t really found in men up till then…the mere fact that he had this ridiculous idea that men were some dominant element just didn’t bother me then,” the 91-year-old says plainly. “It’s very strange.”        

         Women who owe their fame to an association with a famous artist often struggle to define themselves on their own terms. But Charis Wilson seems to have long ago put it all in perspective. Looking back at her life, it was all hard work: the ostensibly glamorous years of her youth with Weston no less than her later years as a working class activist and mother.

         Her greatest achievement, she says, is just “having stayed alive this long.”

Charis Wilson died Friday November 2o, 2009, at 95.