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Charis Wilson (1914-) http://tinyurl.com/CWilson

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A Real Forest

From California and the West, 1940.

Reader: Jessica Teeter

Guided by genius, skill, patience, and luck, photographer Edward Weston created some of our most compelling images of the Golden State. In the late thirties, Weston traveled throughout California, intent on creating a series of photographs of the west. With him was his companion, Charis Wilson, who kept her own fascinating journal of the trip.

Revised and printed with Weston's arresting photographs, Charis Wilson's writing offered unforgettable word images as complement to Weston's photography. Here she describes a forest of California's coastal redwoods

Ever since reading the childhood stories that began, "Once upon a time a woodcutter and his son lived at the edge of a dark and gloomy forest," this is what I have thought a real forest should look like—giant trees with branches closing high overhead, cutting off the light; years of fallen needles carpeting the ground; moss-covered trunks lying here and there, hanging gardens of ferns and flowers growing from their upturned roots. The line of memorial groves south of Dyerville is preserved in its natural state; nothing is cleaned up or cut away. The gloomy shafts of the redwood trunks rise from a jungle of undergrowth—carpets of redwood sorrel, trillium, wild violets, ferns and mosses, as well as the multitudes of infant redwoods.

. . . . Although rain fell gently for most of the three days we spent there, the thick forest roof made such an excellent umbrella that we often didn't know it was raining until we drove out into the open.

Charis Wilson became Weston's second wife; after the marriage ended, she continued to write and her work includes a 1998 book, Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston, written with Wendy Madar.