Kelsey, Robin Chercheur invité dans le cadre du programme de la Terra Foundation for American Art (janvier 2011)

Biographie Professeur d'Histoire de la Photographie à Harvard depuis 2009, Robin Kelsey s'intéresse à la question du rôle du hasard dans la production photographique, à la photographie géographique, à la théorie du paysage et aux rencontres entre l'art et le droit (le Pr. Kelsey étant également titulaire d'un Juris Doctorate de Yale University). Il a fondé et anime le "Harvard and founder of the Harvard Photography and History Workshop". Ses travaux ont été couronnés par plusieurs prix et bourses de recherche (du Getty Institute et du Clark Art Institute notamment). Ses enseignements reçoivent régulièrement les fameux teaching awards universitaires, notamment en 2006 le « Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates ».

• Archive Style : Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890, University of California Press, 2007
• With Blake Stimson, The Meaning of Photography, the Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2008. - Photography and Chance, University of California, à paraître

Publications récentes

Programme des cours et conférences de Robin Kelsey à Paris

• Jeudi 6 janvier, de 14h à 16h, salle Weil. Rencontre avec les étudiants de l'ENS, dans le cadre du séminaire "Atlas d'histoire de l'art contemporain".

• Mardis 11, 18 et 25 janvier, de 10h à 11h30, SALLE des ACTES, ENS (45 rue d'Ulm)

• Mercredi 12 janvier, de 17h30 à 19h30, salle CELAN, ENS (45 rue d'Ulm) : intervention dans le cadre du séminaire de Ségolène Le Men et Claude Imbert "Arts, création, cognition" (INHA/ENS/Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense).

"Positions and Occupiers : the photography of Frederick Sommer, 1938-45" Born in Italy, raised mainly in Brazil, and educated in the United States, Frederick Sommer was a practicing landscape architect in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, when he came down with tuberculosis. After recuperating in Switzerland, he spent time in Paris, before moving to the American southwest, where he became an artist and photographer. Between 1938 and 1945, he made an exceptional set of photographs that confronted the war while contending with the premises and approaches of the European avant-garde. This lecture will discuss these photographs in light of Sommer's transatlantic formation and experiences. Le professeur Robin Kesley donnera également une conference à l'INHA (2 rue Vivienne), le mardi 18 janvier, de 18h à 20h, salle VASARI : "Clement Greenberg and photography". In devising his modernist scheme, the critic Clement Greenberg struggled to accommodate photography. This talk will consider why photography was a problem for Greenberg and analyze his early writings on the medium.

• Jeudi 20 janvier, à 18h, conférence à la Terra Foundation for American Art, Paris (2 rue des Pyramides).

"John Baldessari and Stieglitz's Equivalents in the Early 1970s"

In his work of the early 1970s, John Baldessari rather obsessively worked over the legacy of Alfred Stieglitz's cloud photographs or Equivalents. He made several series of photographs of clouds of cigar smoke and balls thrown into the air. Because art historians have habitually treated the use of photography in Conceptual art as a means of responding to the impossibility of painting or of exploring the implications of the ready-made, the dialogue between Conceptual art and the history of photography has been neglected. This paper will ponder the historical and pictorial significance of the Equivalents in Baldessari's practice during this crucial period. Why did these symbolist exercises continue to warrant such attention in the early 1970s ? Why were they crucial for Baldessari as he reconfigured the tenets of Minimalism and Pop ?