Kelli Connell

Connell was born in Oklahoma City and earned a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Texas Woman’s University. From early on, she was interested in how viewers infer personality and even the nature of a relationship from the direction of a body, clothing, and physical distance in a photograph. The Museum of Contemporary Photography situates her work around questions of identity and social constructions that are activated in the viewer. ^*5 In an interview with Strange Fire Collective, Connell explains that her first high-school photography class led her toward the medium and that Double Life developed into a long-term project through which she examined self-understanding and the roles people assume in relationships. ^*4

Double Life began in the early 2000s, as Photoshop-based image manipulation was becoming part of photography’s everyday vocabulary. In a 2004 exhibition, Lawndale Art Center placed Connell within the “Photoshop Generation” while emphasizing doubling, gender, and role-playing over technical trickery itself. ^*2 Alice Austen House likewise describes the twenty-year series as an autobiographical inquiry into sexuality and gender roles. ^*3

Why Double Life Turns One Person into Two

The decision to make one model appear as two people gives multiple, shifting roles within a relationship the same body. In an interview with Strange Fire Collective, Connell says that Double Life began after the end of a long-term relationship, when she started reconsidering her sexuality and the roles she had performed within relationships.^*4 Different clothing, postures, lines of sight, and degrees of physical distance make masculine/feminine, active/passive, supporting/supported positions appear as roles that can exchange places within one person. The Met describes The Valley as a work made by photographing one model multiple times and digitally joining the images so that they appear to depict a relationship between two women.^*1

In an interview with Time Out Chicago, Connell explains that she watched body language and clothing in places such as supermarkets and gay bars, thinking about how quickly people infer gender and the roles of a couple from those cues.^*15 In Double Life, gestures move back and forth within the same body without settling neatly into conventional butch/femme roles. Because the scenes resemble ordinary photographs of couples, the viewer’s own act of assigning roles from posture, distance, and clothing becomes part of how the image works.

Seamless Compositing and Doubt about Photographic “Evidence”

The concealment of the composite is essential. Connell photographs the model in separate roles with a medium-format camera while keeping location and light consistent, then joins the images. MoCP’s account emphasizes how body language, clothing, and lighting establish the emotional distance between the two figures and allow the scene to register first as an everyday moment. ^*5 Catherine Edelman Gallery’s 2011 exhibition similarly identifies the seamless combination of a single model performing two roles as central to the work’s appearance as an ordinary relationship photograph. ^*20 In an interview with The Advocate, Connell also explains that she was drawn to photography not because it could certify “truth,” but because it could generate questions for the viewer. ^*6 The fiction in Double Life therefore does not announce the failure of photographic truth. It first earns belief, then makes the basis of that belief uncertain.

Model, Performance, and Self-Timer: The Roles of Photographer and Subject

Connell’s long collaboration with model Kiba Jacobson does not follow a portrait structure in which the photographer alone determines the subject’s image. According to an interview with BLOW Photo, Connell used the self-timer to test positions herself, working out bodily orientation and points of contact as she constructed a scene. ^*7 A conversation published by Yoffy Press discusses the self-timer as a way to reduce the fixed power difference between photographer and “muse.” ^*8

Twenty Years Change the Bodies of the “Two” Women

Works including Picnic, The Valley, Carnival, Reflection, and Head to Head carry the pleasures of romantic attachment alongside silence, fatigue, arguments, consolation, and solitude, as if they belonged to the history of the same two people. Alice Austen House’s Double Life, 20 Years made the duration of the series central to the exhibition, tracing the model’s body from early scenes that perform a relationship between young women into middle age.^*3

Twenty years also introduced aging into a project already concerned with gender and sexuality. A 2021 Musée Magazine review reads the model’s movement from youth into middle age as bringing female aging—still underrepresented in visual culture—into the frame.^*16 Here digital compositing does not function as retouching that fixes the body at a younger age. Across the doubled images, it records how the same person changes over two decades.

Pictures for Charis and a Reconsideration of the Weston/Wilson Story

In the more recent Pictures for Charis, Connell studied Edward Weston’s photographs and Charis Wilson’s writings, then traveled with her partner Betsy Odom through parts of the American West where Weston and Wilson had lived and worked. The Cleveland Museum of Art presents the series as a reconsideration of Wilson’s life, which has often been simplified in the shadow of Weston’s canonical reputation, through several overlapping positions: photographer/subject, man/woman, heterosexual/queer. ^*9 The High Museum explains that nearly a decade of research and repeated travel also raised the problem of how a photographer might avoid flattening another person’s life. ^*10 Aperture likewise describes the book as visual research that combines photographs and writing. ^*11

Pictures for Charis also changes Connell’s method. Aperture’s publication materials describe it as her first project to combine photography and writing as methods of visual research and storytelling.^*17 Double Life creates fiction within the boundaries of a single photograph. Pictures for Charis instead brings together archival research, travel photographs, Wilson’s writing, Weston’s photographs, and Connell’s own experience with her partner, using that sequence to investigate and revise a received photographic history.

Comparing Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman: From Role-Playing to Intimate Collaboration

Connell’s work is frequently compared with Cindy Sherman, although Connell does not identify Sherman as a primary early influence. She says that she was drawn to photography immediately after her first high-school class and names Francesca Woodman, Larry Sultan, and Roni Horn among the artists who strongly affected her early development; Sherman, she explains, was not one of the principal influences at that stage. ^*14 The comparison between Connell and Sherman rests more on formal proximity: one body performing multiple roles and scenes with a cinematic charge. Because Connell assigns two roles to the same model instead of staging herself, the question shifts from “Who do I appear to be?” toward the possibility that what looks like a relationship between two people may also describe multiplicity within one person.

While developing Pictures for Charis, Connell researched photographic histories built around the long-term photographing of intimate partners. She has said that she studied Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Seiichi Furuya and Christine Gössler, and Edward Weston and Charis Wilson.^*4 The positions of viewer/viewed and lover/self that one model performed in Double Life became, in Pictures for Charis, a question of how to make portraits collaboratively with an actual partner. The Cleveland Museum of Art likewise describes the act of lovers photographing one another as an intimate form of collaboration.^*19 Connell’s work sits where two histories meet: performed identity and the sustained relationship between photographer and partner.

In Pictures for Charis, the question already present in Double Life—who performs whom, and who looks at whom—is redirected toward the historical photographer/model relationship of Weston and Wilson. An exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography foregrounds portraiture as a record of the relationship between photographer and sitter, while Cleveland’s related programming places Connell’s work within her continuing inquiry into gender, sexuality, and identity. ^*12 Columbia College Chicago’s profile also shows that she has continued to make work while teaching photography since Double Life. ^*13 Connell’s distinctive strategy is to keep Photoshop from becoming the visual event: she first lets an image pass as an ordinary photograph of a couple, then returns the question to the viewer—why did you assume there were two people? She repeated that structure for more than two decades.

Digital Compositing in the Early 2000s: The Critical Force of Hiding the Technique

Double Life began at a moment when digital compositing had itself become part of the debate over photographic truth. Lawndale Art Center’s 2004 exhibition connected Connell to the “Photoshop Generation,” discussing digital technology alongside Surrealist doubling and gender roles. ^*2 Connell, however, does not place Photoshop itself at the center of the work. She develops the film, tests possible pairings by hand from contact sheets, scans the negatives, and finally joins them seamlessly so that viewers can, at least initially, believe that both figures occupied the same moment. ^*14

Writing on digital photography has examined this compositing in relation to photography and reality. Yi-Hui Huang analyzes Double Life as an example of digital compositing that joins images that never existed in a single exposure and gives photographic form to a “reality” unavailable to direct vision.^*18 The two women in Connell’s frame were never simultaneously present, yet the project begins from the experience of contradictory roles, desires, and self-images coexisting within one person. The composite therefore gives two bodies to a psychological and social multiplicity that a single exposure cannot show simultaneously in one body.

For Connell, digitization is not a competition to display the traces of manipulation. It is necessary to establish the premise that two people shared the same place, then undo that premise afterward. Connell has said that creating emotional weight and tension matters more than the Photoshop process itself. ^*14 Within queer self-representation in the 2000s, her work also avoids presenting sexual identity as a single label. Instead, it embeds a person’s movement between active/passive, masculine/feminine, supporting/supported positions within a relationship in a form that looks as ordinary as possible: the couple photograph. Hiding the technique creates the conditions for questioning fixed gender roles and photography’s evidentiary authority at the same time.

Why Double Life Looks Like a Real Couple Photograph: The Viewer’s Misreading

Double Life changes once the composite is recognized. At first, viewers may read the image as an ordinary photograph of lovers and infer a relationship from the angle of a shoulder or the direction of a gaze. Once they learn that both figures are the same person, the body language they had treated as “evidence” of a relationship becomes multiple roles performed by one individual. MoCP addresses both the technical construction and the psychological dimension because this two-stage reading is built into the work.^*5 If the composite were conspicuous, the viewer could distance the image as fabricated from the outset. Connell instead matches lighting, focus, and domestic details closely enough to create the time of an ordinary snapshot. The central issue is not whether the viewer can detect Photoshop, but how quickly a single photograph is used to infer lovers, gender, and personality. Connell’s account of the self as fluid takes concrete form in this act of misreading.^*4