Unusual encounters with household — Harvard Gazette

Robin Kelsey isn’t any much less thinking about what an image hides than what it reveals. Turns out the thriller runs simply as deep—extra so, maybe—when the individual trying again at him is blood.

“Did they have a temper? Were they friendly? Did they laugh a lot? You can’t tell from these images.”

Kelsey, the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography and the creator of “Photography and the Art of Chance,” was reacting to footage of his mom’s household, from Mason City, Iowa, despatched to him by a cousin.

He paused to recall a line from an essay by the German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer — “Beneath a person’s photograph, their history is buried as if under a blanket of snow” — earlier than paging deeper into the previous.

“One of the things I love about my mother’s side of the family is they were a bit eccentric, a bit zany in certain respects,” Kelsey stated. “They were creative and pretty intrepid.”

Many of the black-and-white pictures seize playful summer season moments spent on the household cabin in northern Minnesota. They doc days of swimming, canoeing, tenting, and throwing horseshoes.

Some names and faces are acquainted — Kelsey’s great-grandparents William and Hattie Egloff; his great-uncles Max and Bill — however the context is misplaced, leaving the pictures as a form of sediment, to make use of one other of Kracauer’s metaphors. Even so, stated Kelsey, “I like the feeling of spending time with the ancestors. We’re a culture that tends not to value ancestors … snapshots are one way that we can bring them to mind.”

For a scholar who’s spent many years dedicated to images, the pictures introduce an intimate stress between viewer and topic. His kinfolk, he stated, “were people of action and activity. They wouldn’t sit around looking at old photographs. There’s a paradox there with what I love doing.” Laughing, he added, “They would tell me to go out and chop some wood and make myself useful.”

Otherwise, he’s left to surprise.

“The magic of these old photographs is that they are simply moments in a story that you have to write with your imagination.”