Wesleyan University • Fall 2008

EYE OF HISTORY The Camera as Witness

Professor Robin Kelsey

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities
Department of History of Art and Architecture
Harvard University

Robin Kelsey specializes in the history of photography and American art. He is the author of the widely praised book Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (2007), and co-editor (with Blake Stimson) of The Meaning of Photography (2008). He has written or lectured on various subjects, including landscape theory, eco-criticism, and early cinema. His landmark article in the Art Bulletin, “Viewing the Archive: Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s Photographs from the Wheeler Survey, 1871–1874,” won the 2004 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize. He is currently working on two books, Photography and Chance and Viewed with Suspicion: Photography in America, 1959–1976.

…the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but [instead] the one who invents it.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography