Strange encounters with family

Robin Kelsey is no less interested in what a picture hides than what it reveals. Turns out the mystery runs just as deep—more so, perhaps—when the person looking back 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 author of “Photography and the Art of Chance,” was reacting to pictures of his mother’s family, from Mason City, Iowa, sent 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” — before paging deeper into the past.

“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 said. “They were creative and pretty intrepid.”

Many of the black-and-white images capture playful summer moments spent at the family cabin in northern Minnesota. They document days of swimming, canoeing, camping, and throwing horseshoes.

Some names and faces are familiar — Kelsey’s great-grandparents William and Hattie Egloff; his great-uncles Max and Bill — but the context is lost, leaving the photographs as a kind of sediment, to use another of Kracauer’s metaphors. Even so, said 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 decades devoted to photography, the images introduce an intimate tension between viewer and subject. His relatives, he said, “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 wonder.

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