Edward Weston's Carmel Cat Colony

April 28, 2026

The Cats of Wildcat Hill chronicles photographer Edward Weston and his wife Charis Wilson’s cat colony in Carmel, California. Published in 1947, the story begins in 1938 when the couple moves to a two-acre plot of land that they decide is perfect for having “several cats at once.” They initially foresee having eight or ten cats but later found that the population “rarely fell below twelve and frequently rose above twenty.”

If you know anything about Edward Weston, these are not your run of the mill pet snapshots. He is widely considered one of the masters of 20th century photography known for bringing modernist compositions to his landscapes, still lives, and nudes. He also cofounded f/64, the Bay Area-based photographer’s group whose members included other 20th century greats like Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham. While the impeccably composed photographs depict calm, curious, and very cute cats with very inventive names (e.g. Pipsey, Fraidy, Runty Nubbins, Zohmah), Wilson’s narrative presents a more complicated view of the situation.

The book follows several generations within the colony, highlighting their distinctive personalities, sometimes adorable, frequently exasperating behaviors, and chronicling the many challenges of managing a large cat colony. As their numbers grew, the couple struggled to manage infighting and behavioral issues among the cats. Wilson recounts numerous fights between territorial tomcats, unsuccessful attempts to isolate female cats in heat, and the countless litters of kittens that followed. Most contemporary readers might be surprised that spaying and neutering never once comes up as a solution to these problems. But according to the ASPCA, pet sterilization was not widely practiced in the US until the 1970s. Prior to this, unwanted animals were euthanized in large numbers, “carried out in ways that were far from what we now consider humane.”

In the early years, the couple oversaw the colony with little intervention, believing that the population would manage itself. Wilson mentions instances of adopting out litters of kittens, but eventually they began taking on the grim task of euthanizing the kittens themselves, sometimes leaving one per littler to ease the anxiety of “frantic mothers searching for lost children all over the house.” Following Weston’s death in 1958 and several years after he and Wilson divorced, his son placed an ad in the Monterey Peninsula Herald seeking a home for the photographer’s two female cats, “both spayed” and “quite un-wild and affectionate.” At the end, it appears that Weston was ahead of the spay/neuter curve.

Despite the many challenges of managing the colony, the story gives readers a vivid glimpse into the couple’s bohemian and highly unconventional life together, and a sense of what the city of Carmel was like when it was still very much an arts colony. More significantly though, it presents Wilson as a unique voice in her own right. She met Weston in 1934 at the age of 19 (he was 48). Within a year, they moved in together and were married from 1939 to 1946. Throughout their relationship, she was the subject of hundreds of his photos, and a frequent though often uncredited collaborator. In addition to the Cats of Wildcat Hill, she wrote the narratives for Weston’s photobooks Seeing California with Edward Weston, California and the West, as well as numerous articles for photography magazines that were credited to him, and the grant application that earned him the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer.

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Post tagged as: special collections, rare books, california