Karla Kelsey – författare

Reassessing the career of the hugely influential Harper’s Bazaar art director, who changed the course of twentieth-century American photography and graphic design  This lavishly illustrated volume explores the influence and significance of the Russian-born photographer, designer, and instructor Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971), best known for his art directorship of the American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar between 1934 and 1958, as well as his tutelage of many celebrated documentary and fashion photographers, including Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, and Lillian Bassman. Though disparate in their aesthetic approaches, these figures are unified by their responses to Brodovitch’s dictum to “astonish me.” The authors address Brodovitch’s impact on photography as an artistic medium in the mid-twentieth century and explore how European art and design became the foundation of a new American print culture. Brodovitch’s own work will be illuminated through his personal projects—such as the magazine Portfolio and the photographic project Ballet, which depicted performances of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the United States (whose evolution echoed Brodovitch’s own émigré condition). Case studies of his transformative collaborations with photographers such as Arnold, Avedon, Penn, Lisette Model, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hans Namuth, and André Kertész reveal pivotal encounters that may surprise even the most ardent photography aficionado. An illustrated chronology offers an important tool for scholars on this influential but often overlooked figure.  Distributed for the Barnes Foundation  Exhibition Schedule:  Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia(March 3–May 19, 2024)

Lyrical poems that tell the story of a nameless woman navigating a technological dystopia.  In the poems of On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher’s place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems.  Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique, On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.

Karla Kelsey's A Conjoined Book hinges together two texts-Aftermath and Become Tree, Become Bird-to create a meditation on the nature of aboutness. Aftermath unfolds after an unnamed ecological/emotional fracture, creating a landscape of rift where the "I" imagines herself as "she," and perceptions weave into memory and fiction. Become Tree, Become Bird grafts the Brothers Grimm's The Juniper Tree to the body of Aftermath, reworking what has splintered into a variation of fairy tale. Throughout A Conjoined Book, Kelsey's condensed imagery, shifting viewpoints, and interwoven formal structures set lyric and narrative a-shimmer.Blending experiment and tradition, this book will appeal to a wide audience interested in seeing how fairy tale, philosophy, ecology, narratology, history. As Julie Carr writes:"horror, elegy, mystery, fairy tale, lyric, treatise, fragment meet one another with all their intensities of emotion and intellect."

An inspired and engaging perspective of feminist art-making in a fractured world, Blood Feather reimagines resistance. With the help of three fictive narrators, an actress, a thinker, and a filmmaker create boundless opportunities for relatability. Caught up in a hurricane of identities, the actress wonders where the performance of character stops, saying, “rain has/a way of showing costumes for/what they really are”. The thinker, a so-called muse for her architect husband, searches for her self in a lyric embodying the molting process of a bird. This kind of evolution is central to all narratives, inspiring the reader to reflect on their own passages of growth. Taking its title from a vulnerable new feather of a bird that contains a constant flow of blood, Blood Feather reminds us of the essential yet fragile position of art. Protest and resistance can take that vital place of the blood inside of the feather in order to assert the importance of artful poetry such as this.