By
Leon Graham
leong@lakevillejournal.com
ROBIN KELSEY Photo Submitted
SALISBURY — The Salisbury Forum turns away from its usual sessions on global and national issues into the world of photography on Friday, April 8, at 7:30 p.m. when Harvard’s Robin Kelsey presents “How Photography Has Changed Our Lives — Performing for the Camera” at the Salisbury School’s Seifert Theater.
Kelsey, currently a visiting professor at Williams College, is the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. Yet Kelsey followed an unusual, almost eccentric path to obtain that august title.
A child of two anthropologists teaching in Minnesota, he lived in a home where photographs were professional material for his parents: They told stories and documented field research in Mexico and among American Indians. But Kelsey intended to be an attorney. However, after receiving both undergraduate and law degrees from Yale, he found the study of law very different from its practice. He was unhappy, and he missed academia.
Kelsey became a doctoral student in art history at Harvard, where he planned a dissertation on American landscape painting. But when he was invited to speak at a professional meeting with no session on his subject, he chose instead to present a paper on 19th-century photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, a famous photographer of the Civil War and the American West.
“After I gave the talk, members of the audience said how happy they were I was working on this for my dissertation, which I wasn’t,” Kelsey said. “So I took this as a hint from the universe that I had perhaps stumbled upon a more promising topic” and switched gears.
His eventual dissertation covered O’Sullivan’s great photographic survey of the West.
When Harvard created a junior professorship in photography and offered it to him, Kelsey decided to accept rather than take a position at another school in more traditional areas of art history.
“I leapt into this professional formation of myself as a photo historian, which involved a steep learning curve since I had never done any graduate course work in the history of photography.”
Kelsey is especially drawn to the populist, democratic qualities of photography. Susan Sontag in her seminal 1977 collection of essays, “On Photography,” declared photography as important an art form as painting, particularly since the photographer “creates” by choosing to include — or eliminate — elements in his or her images. Whether Kelsey agrees with Sontag or not, he expresses “conflict” with the current practice of photography.
As a photographer himself, Kelsey says he suffers from “photographer’s block.” He feels “burdened by knowing all that has been done, the brilliant things that have been done.” But he is determined to “become more serious about the practice,” even as it means negotiating that past.