Helen Charis Wilson (/ˈkɛərɪs/; May 5, 1914 – November 20, 2009), was an American model and writer, most widely known as a subject of Edward Weston's photographs.

Her father wrote popular fiction, including the bestselling novel Ruggles of Red Gap, which was later made into a movie.

Income from his writing provided a relatively high standard of living for the time, and in 1910 he built a 12-room house in Carmel Highlands.

During this time her parents separated, and from then she was cared for primarily by her grandmother and her great aunt, who were both writers and part of the literary scene of San Francisco.

While still in high school she met the famous art collectors Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, who lived nearby.

Walter Arensberg encouraged her by asking for her opinions about art and by engaging her in word play and intellectual puzzles and conundrums.

[1] The two determined she should go back to the Catlin Gabel School to complete her senior year and then go on to Sarah Lawrence College.

Her father approved of her returning to Portland to finish high school, but although she won a full scholarship to Sarah Lawrence he refused to allow her to go.

Wilson wrote in her memoir that she was "desperately unhappy" as she "acquired a number of boyfriends and patronized the last of the speakeasies" [the illegal secret bars that operated during the Prohibition era].

Weston wrote that at a concert in December 1933 or January 1934 he saw "this tall, beautiful girl, with fine proportioned body, intelligent face, well-freckled, blue eyes, golden brown hair to shoulders – and had to meet.

He made 31 photographs of her nude form in 1934 alone, each laboriously visualized and captured with his 4 X 5 Graflex camera, then hand developed and printed in his small darkroom.

In mid-1935 Weston moved to Los Angeles for a project funded by the Works Progress Administration, and he asked Wilson to live with him there.

She knew exactly what she was doing—how furniture framed her or shadows fell, how her knee or shoulder would look turned just so, or what a good idea it would be to run and roll naked down the giant sand dunes at Oceano, a small part of that infinite, flowing unity of all forms that he was always looking for.

[12] For protection against the mosquitos, Wilson had her head wrapped in a towel, which made her appear like a "Bedouin princess" who had been transplanted to Yosemite as only her face was visible.

[12] The following year the Guggenheim Fellowship was renewed, and Weston and Wilson settled down to printing and cataloging much of his work.

They moved to a new home on Wildcat Hill near Carmel, where in a separate building Wilson finally had a place of her own to write.

Wilson felt that she was as much of the author of Seeing California as Weston as she was the one who actually typed out the manuscript and her skill at writing vastly exceeded his.

[4] Most sources usually credited Weston as the author of Seeing California with the assumption being made that Wilson was just posing for his photographs.

She moved to Santa Cruz and lived close to her other daughter Rachel Fern Harris for the rest of her life.

[14] In 1977 Wilson wrote the introduction for a book of photographs, Edward Weston Nudes, which is now sought after by collectors.

At the time of her death she and her daughter, Rachel, were staying at the home of poet Joseph Stroud in Santa Cruz, California.

[15] Wilson's archive can be accessed at the Center for Creative Photography located on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson.