Strange encounters with family

Harvard Gazette reports that photography scholar Robin Kelsey, a professor at Harvard, has been looking through old family photos from his mother's side. He says the black-and-white images capture playful summer moments at a family cabin in northern Minnesota, but they can't reveal the personalities behind the faces — whether his relatives had tempers or laughed a lot. Kelsey, author of 'Photography and the Art of Chance,' notes the paradox of his own love for studying photographs while his ancestors were people of action who would have told him to chop wood instead. He reflects that the magic of these old photos is that they are moments in a story you have to write with your imagination.

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