Chicago photographer Kelli Connell steps into the frame with expansive Elmhurst show

Relationships, encounters and their sometimes fraught dynamics pervade Kelli Connell’s thoughtful, quietly provocative images, which explore themes like queer identity and photographic truth.

Starting Saturday, 53 of Connell’s images will unfold across two exhibitions inside the Elmhurst Art Museum, the largest-ever display of Connell’s work in the Chicago area. Until last year, Connell was a professor at Columbia College Chicago, where she mentored dozens of aspiring young visual artists and established herself as part of an important group of Chicago photographers exploring a distinctive brand of psychological portraiture.

Allison Peters Quinn, who took over as executive director and chief curator of the Elmhurst Art Museum in 2024, believes Connell ranks among Chicago’s most important photographers but has not received the attention she deserves.

The traveling exhibition “Living with Modernism: Kelli Connell,” Peters Quinn hopes, will rectify that slight.

“She has not had much exposure here,” Peters Quinn said. “People know her personally as a great mentor and instructor, but they don’t know so much about the trajectory of her work. These were great projects, and because they span multiple years, you can really get a sense of what she does.”

Co-organized by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Cleveland Museum of Art and High Museum of Art in Atlanta, “Living with Modernism: Kelli Connell” spans previous work and new. The smaller of the two features eight fresh images commissioned by the Elmhurst Museum that are a continuation of Connell’s “Double Life” series, which first gained her widespread attention in 2007 at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.

The other showcases 45 of Connell’s large-scale images from her well-known series “Pictures of Charis.” The series, which began with a photograph Connell took of her then-partner Betsy Odom on a bed at a Michigan inn in 2009, was inspired by photographer Edward Weston. Weston was known for pictures he made showing his model and companion, Charis Wilson, from 1934 until their relationship dissolved around 1945.

Connell, a native of Oklahoma City who grew up in Texas and earned a master’s degree from the Texas Woman’s University, had little interest in Weston’s work when she first encountered it as a student. But that 2009 photograph reminded her of Weston’s well-known image of a curved body on the dunes of Oceano, Calif.

Connell wondered about the identity of this mystery woman, who was simply known as “Nude” in the titles of Weston’s photos. She ultimately learned it was Charis Wilson and discovered that Wilson was an aspiring writer who supplied the text for Weston’s famous 1940 photography book, “California and the West.” The muse later wrote a memoir called “Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston.”

“I was like, ‘This is amazing,’” Connell said. “She is hilarious. She is really witty. I want to know more about her.”

That started the odyssey that became “Pictures for Charis.” Like Weston, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship to undertake the 1,110 photographs of the American West that would make up his 1940 book, Connell also received a fellowship. From 2014 through 2022, she returned to many of the sites Weston featured, but with Odom serving as her model and muse. She made not re-creations of Weston’s images from some 80 years earlier but contemporary re-interpretations and responses filtered through her research on Wilson, who died in 2009.

“Isn’t it crazy,” Connell said, “that I went down a rabbit hole to spend so much time with this woman that I’ll never meet?”

Connell’s large-scale images will line the walls of the Elmhurst gallery, and 48 of Weston’s vintage 8-by-10 prints from the Center for Creative Photography will be shown in flat vitrines in the center of the space. The arrangement will allow viewers to look across the room and see the multilayered connections between the two bodies of work.

In the smaller of the two exhibitions, “Double Life,” Connell uses digital manipulation to make it appear that her subject, the model Kiba Jacobson, is playing two different people or perhaps two sides of the same person in a range of settings and activities. Jacobson has served as a model for the series since it began in 2002.

“The ‘Double Life’ work started to really take off,” Connell said, “because it hit at a time when people were talking about truth vs. fiction in photography. People were just starting to use Photoshop compositing. Identity was also a topic that was starting to come up.”

The latest eight images in the series were taken in Mies van der Rohe’s 1952 McCormick House and will be exhibited there. The modernist single-family home was moved from its original location in the 1990s and is part of the Elmhurst Museum campus.