It’s the delicate veil of hair on her leg that draws comments now, but when Edward Weston took the pristine nude of his lover, Charis Wilson, in 1936, it was the pubic hair that was troublesome. Wilson, now 75, has written that she remembers Weston poring over the print with a magnifying glass, trying to determine whether he could send it through the U.S. mail.
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They had met in Carmel two years earlier. Wilson was a nubile 19-year-old, the daughter of Harry Leon Wilson, a popular novelist of the time, and Weston was 28 years her senior, but it was high romance right from the start. Their eyes locked across the proverbial crowded room; a charged introduction followed. Even in Weston’s life of “supreme instants,” this one stood out. They agreed that she would come to his studio to look at prints.
There were nudes too, more realistic and moving than any Wilson had seen before. When Weston returned, she came back to his studio to model for him, and at the second session she became his lover. Here’s Weston’s account of it, from his journal:
She also wrote his portion of California and the West, a book they did together combining photographs and text, which chronicled their two years of Guggenheim-sponsored work and travel.
