Charis Wilson obituary | Photography

Charis Wilson obituary

Charis Wilson, whose name will always be linked to that of the renowned Californian photographer Edward Weston, has died aged 95. Most frequently described as Weston's great muse and the model of his middle/late years, she was also his driver, secretary, business manager and accountant, and wrote many of the texts that accompanied his photography books from the mid-1930s to 1940s.

Charis (her Greek name, meaning Grace, was pronounced rather like a caress) was born, like all four of Weston's great loves, into a humble family from which intelligence and beauty looked likely to raise her. Her father, Harry Leon Wilson, was a minor novelist – the best known of his works was a humorous serial called Ruggles of Red Gap, relating how a stuffy English valet made out in the American west. He was 45 when he married the 16-year-old Helen McGowan, daughter of another writer, Grace McGowan Cooke. Helen gave her first name to their daughter, who jettisoned it for Charis when she tired of being called "little Helen", and also provided a role model as an actor, a career Charis also briefly pursued.

Charis won a scholarship to study at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, but her chance for a real change of circumstances was overturned when her parents were unable to make up the shortfall to have her travel and live on the east coast. (Ruined by the Depression, Harry Leon Wilson deemed that "even the ancillary costs are too onerous"). Charis no doubt drew on this experience later in writing the application for Weston to be awarded the first Guggenheim Fellowship to go to a photographer. And to help him spend it, by taking to the road with him from 1937-38, during which time they made their first book together, containing close to 100 images, called California and the West (1940).

The couple had met at a concert early in 1934, when Charis was 19 and Weston 48, and were introduced by her older brother. According to Charis's daughter Rachel: "She was leading rather a dissolute life at the time. She basically said 'OK, I can't do what I want, so I'll live with abandon'." The attraction between them was instantaneous and mutual. According to Arthur Ollman, who described Charis at length in his 1999 book on artists and muses, The Model Wife, she was "the perfect model, lively, beautiful, uninhibited, playfully experimental and always at hand …" For her part, Charis had at once noted that the diminutive and whiskery older man in his brown corduroy suit was "twice as alive as anyone else in the room … his eyes most likely saw twice as much as anyone else's".

She first posed for him weeks later, and found it a transformative experience: "I knew I really didn't look that good, and that Edward had glorified me, but it was a very pleasant thing to be glorified and I couldn't wait to go back for more." While the initial session had featured isolated aspects of the nude in the form of apparently dismembered limbs, the second synthesised woman and body into a unitary identity.

An early work, Nude, 1934, follows Weston's earlier pattern of shooting the woman as he would one of his famous still lifes, a conch or a capsicum, for instance. Working with sensuality but also meticulous detachment, the blanched body emerges from pitch blackness, a tangle of long limbs, the face obliterated. As he worked more closely with her, Weston went from captioning the portraits Nude (plus, possibly, a location), to Charis Wilson, to simply Charis. The trajectory was swift, for, by the end of 1934, Weston noted that: "We are closer than ever. Perhaps Charis will be remembered as the great love of my life. Already I have reached certain heights reached with no other love."

If she is remembered thus, that will be due to the photoportraits rather than to Weston's diary reminiscences, written in characteristically prissy style, and collected in The Daybooks of Edward Weston in 1981. One picture, again titled Nude, 1936, shows long limbs entwined in a yogic pose, a play of bright light and black shade in lines silhouetting the arms extended about the knees like a wreath. This time, the head is not cut, but bowed, so all we see is the gleam of hair bisected with the white line of a parting. The classicism of the pose contrasts with others Weston took of Charis around this time, including Charis Wilson, 1935, in which the model adopts the pose Christine Keeler was to make famous, straddling the rush seat of a heavy wooden chair, her petti- coat hitched waist-high, her tight dark top and jaunty beret framing a clear face in which the eyes engage the camera lens directly.

Equally famous, and surprisingly as sensual, is Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937, in which the model is entirely covered, wearing what resembles military fatigues and heavy laced boots, a scarf tying down her long hair. Yet her position, seated leaning against some striated rocks, her knees parted wide and her hands loosely crossed at her crotch, is just as challenging.

By 1934, Wilson and Weston were living together; in 1939 they married; and in 1945 they separated. During their 11 years together, according to the photographer Bruce Weber: "He photographed her clothed and unclothed, espied through a window and frolicking on sand dunes, floating in a pool … she was inspirational – elegant, simple, fiercely intimate and glowingly sensible." She was also immensely practical, working as a secretary, delivering mail or in a fish cannery when they needed funds, and handling his picture sales. A series of six prints of Charis tumbling down a sand dune in Oceano near Los Angeles, which sold for $7 apiece in the 1940s, are now priced at upwards of $1.5m. The one thing Charis did not do was follow in the path of Weston's previous love, the Italian film actor Tina Modotti. While Modotti had used the couple's journeys through Mexico to train and practise as a photographer, Wilson used their year-long road trip around California, with the Guggenheim grant she had won, in driving their Ford V8 and setting up the tarpaulin used to turn the back into the darkroom where she assisted the printing.

Other photographic luminaries, including Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, were among their friends, but Charis insisted her talent was not for photography, but for writing, even though many of the photographic articles she wrote appeared over Weston's byline. Latterly she wrote two part-ghosted memoirs, both of her years with Weston: Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston, co-written with Wendy Madar, appeared in 1999; and Eloquent Nude: the Love and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, in 2007.

The day after her divorce from Weston was made absolute in 1946, Charis married the labour activist Noel Harris, and spent the next 20 years working as a union secretary and a creative writing tutor and raising their two daughters. One, Anita, died in mysterious circumstances (believed murdered) in 1967 and Charis and Noel divorced in the same year. She is survived by Rachel. Weston died in 1958.

Helen Charis Wilson , writer and photographer's model, born 5 May 1914; died 20 November 2009

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