PhotoCarmel 2026: A Celebration of Photography on the Central Coast | Kelli Connell and Dr. Rebecca Senf in Conversation
The Center for Photographic Art will be hosting artist Kelli Connell and curator Dr. Rebecca Senf for a special keynote talk at PhotoCarmel 2026. The conversation will focus on Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (Aperture, 2024). There will be a book signing following the discussion.
Pictures for Charis offers a groundbreaking new work by artist Kelli Connell, synthesizing text and image, while raising vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century. This project is driven by the photographer’s obsession with the writer Charis Wilson, Edward Weston’s partner, model, and collaborator during one of the most productive segments of his historic career. Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locales where the latter couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago.
This event is part of PhotoCarmel 2026. Reserve your seat here.
—
Image: Kelli Connell, Betsy, Santa Fe, 2016; from Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (Aperture, 2024). © 2024 Kelli Connell
Kelli Connell (born in Oklahoma City, 1974) is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity, and photographer/sitter relationships. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others. Connell has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work, and the Center for Creative Photography. Connell is an editor at Skylark Editions and a professor at Columbia College Chicago.
Dr. Rebecca Senf is chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. She is author of Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe (2012), Betsy Schneider: To Be Thirteen (2017), Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams (2020), and editor of Richard Avedon: Relationships (2022). In 2021, based on her successful proposal, the Center for Creative Photography was awarded a significant grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to produce a book and exhibition celebrating the Chicano photographer Louis Carlos Bernal.
You may also like
The Remains of a Handmade Utopia
In the wooded enclaves of Northern California, Michael Schmelling documents what’s left of the 1960s back-to-the-land movement.
Hashem Shakeri’s Portrait of a Climate Hotspot in Iran
In the drylands of Balochistan, a photographer chronicles the art of everyday survival.