Photography has a unique relationship to chance. Anyone who has wielded a camera has taken a picture ruined by an ill-timed blink or enhanced by an unexpected gesture or expression. Although this proneness to chance may amuse the casual photographer, Robin Kelsey points out that historically it has been a mixed blessing for those seeking to make photographic art. On the one hand, it has weakened the bond between maker and picture, calling into question what a photograph can be said to say. On the other hand, it has given photography an extraordinary capacity to represent the unpredictable dynamism of modern life. By delving into these matters, Photography and the Art of Chance transforms our understanding of photography and the work of some of its most brilliant practitioners. The effort to make photographic art has involved a call and response across generations. From the introduction of photography in 1839 to the end of the analog era, practitioners such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer, and John Baldessari built upon and critiqued one another's work in their struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration and mechanical process. The root problem was the technology's indifference, its insistence on giving a bucket the same attention as a bishop and capturing whatever wandered before the lens. Could such an automatic mechanism accommodate imagination? Could it make art? Photography and the Art of Chance reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography to create art for a modern world.

Providing an expansive and revelatory look at the collaborative artistic relationship between photographers and printers, this book focuses on the work and practice of Schneider/Erdman, Inc., a Manhattan-based printing business owned by Gary Schneider and John Erdman from 1981 to 2001. Well-known within the booming New York photography scene, Schneider and Erdman printed works by artists such as Richard Avedon, Matthew Barney, and Nan Goldin. In addition to a thorough overview of Schneider and Erdman's technical mastery of printing methods and materials, Analog Culture also sheds light on the importance of the close personal relationship between photographers and printers within the art-making process. The striking works reproduced in the volume are enhanced by exclusive interviews with Schneider, Erdman, and their collaborators, offering an unparalleled behind-the-scenes view of New York's photographic culture in the late 20th century. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums Exhibition Schedule: Harvard Art Museums (05/19/18-08/12/18)

""Archive Style" successfully and beautifully reconciles, or rather intertwines, two viewpoints hitherto considered incompatible--the logic of the archive and the issue of individual style. Robin Kelsey shows, with great historical rigor, how the styles of illustrators Schott, O'Sullivan, and Jones emerged from the very necessities of survey work and from personal resistance to the social and political structures framing such work. "Archive Style," visual history at its best, is a landmark study of nineteenth-century American visual and scientific culture."--Francois Brunet, Professor of American Art and Literature, Universite Paris-Diderot-Paris 7, France
"In this stunningly original book Robin Kelsey takes a fresh look at nineteenth-century survey prints and photographs. Insisting that the distinctive pictorial style of these pictures emerged in response to particular historical needs, he makes the case for a truly interdisciplinary approach to images. He combines an art historian's attention to artistic innovation with a historian's concern for the larger ambitions of the government surveys, to argue that aesthetic style is the product of both individual talent and larger cultural constraints."--Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of American Studies and History at Amherst College
"Robin Kelsey's "Archive Style" is by far the most stimulating, imaginative, and far-reaching study of nineteenth-century American visual culture I have come across in recent years. Drawing upon a wealth of research as well as recent advances in critical theory, Kelsey persuasively reconstructs the historical conditions that in large measure determined the production and reception of surveyimagery."--Alan Wallach, Professor of Art and Art History and Professor of American Studies, The College of William and Mary