In praise of Charis Wilson, muse

Author and Jewish Journal book editor Jonathan Kirsch blogs that his "very first experiment in the deconstruction and interpretation of sexual imagery" took place when, as a child, he found this photograph of Charis Wilson in the book "California and the West,” by Wilson and photographer Edward Weston. She was Weston's muse, lover and wife, her nude body a mainstay of his work for a time. It's this photo of Wilson, however, that has gripped Kirsch:

“Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937” is something unique in Weston’s body of work. As a child, I could not have articulated the reasons why the image is so erotic, but I did not fail to perceive it. Later, as I studied the iconography of religious art while doing research for books of my own, I came to understand that the image expresses both the sexuality and the fecundity of the female form. But it is also an expression of a woman’s power over her own body—- the open knees and the crossed hands seem to suggest a tantalizing invitation and, at the same time, a firm refusal.

Wilson herself debunked the efforts of overheated iconographers, amateur and professional alike. At the moment when Weston snapped the shutter, her face showed exhaustion rather than sensuality, she insisted in her own memoir, “Through Another Lens,” and the curious head-covering was her improvised effort to keep away the annoying mosquitoes. But she was powerless to change the way we perceive the photograph itself, which helps to explain why it is such an enduring and unsettling work of art.

Wilson died last week in Santa Cruz at 95.

Previously on LA Observed: Weston's years in Tropico (now Glendale), with wife Flora May Chandler (in photo) and affairs Tina Modotti and Margrethe Mather: "He was trying to re-write Los Angeles out of his personal history." Edward and Flora

Photos: copyright Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents