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 Friday in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 95.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Rachel Fern Harris.
In January 1934, Wilson was an intellectually inclined, brazenly adventurous young woman of 19 when she met Weston, who was then in his late 40s and a friend of her brother, Leon, at a concert in Carmel, Calif. They were drawn to each other instantly, and she began posing for him shortly thereafter.
"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."
By the following year they were living together; they married in 1939 and separated in 1945, divorcing the following year.
During their 11 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 him.
Weston's inspiration
And 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
Helen Charis Wilson was born in San Francisco on May 5, 1914. Her father, Henry Leon Wilson, was a popular writer of serial fiction whose best-known work was "Ruggles of Red Gap," a humorous tale of a stuffy English valet transported to the American West. He was 45 when he married; his wife, Helen, was 16. Their daughter dropped her first name as a young girl, "because she was tired of being called little Helen," Harris, Charis Wilson's daughter said.
In any case, she preferred Charis (rhymes with Harris), the Greek word for grace; she was named for her grandmother, Grace McGowan Cooke, and was largely raised by her and her great-aunt, Alice McGowan, both of whom were writers.
Her parents were not especially attentive, and she was sent to several schools in California. She earned a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College, but her father, impoverished by the Depression, refused to send her, saying that even the ancillary costs of her education were too onerous. Instead she worked as a secretary and then at a dress shop operated by her mother.
'Live with abandon'
"She was leading a rather dissolute life," her daughter said. "She basically said, 'OK, I can't do what I want, so I'll live with abandon.' "
That was when she met Edward Weston.
The day after her divorce from Weston, Wilson married Noel Harris, a labor activist. They amicably divorced in 1967 and remained close until her death. Their daughter Anita Kathryn Harris died in 1967, and is believed to have been murdered. Her daughter Rachel is her only immediate survivor, but she lived among a close community of friends.
During the past several decades Wilson held a number of jobs, including union secretary and creative writing teacher, but she spent much of her professional life writing and speaking about her time with Weston. In 1977 she wrote a reminiscence for a book of photographs, "Edward Weston Nudes," and in 2007 she appeared in a documentary, "Eloquent Nude." Her memoir, "Through Another Lens," was published in 1999.
