A professional photographer and Greenwood native will be in town Friday to sign copies of her book, “Into the Flat Land,” which collects photographs taken on and around her family’s farm near Minter City.
Kathleen Robbins, a professor of art at the University of South Carolina and a 1994 graduate of Pillow Academy, will sign copies of the book at Turnrow Books on Howard Street in Greenwood beginning at 5:30 p.m. Friday.
The photographs capture the landscapes on and surrounding the Belle Chase Plantation as well as family photographs and portraits.
Robbins called Belle Chase home for two years, living in an otherwise unoccupied house on her maternal grandparents’ farm after completing graduate school at the University of New Mexico in 2001.
“The houses were empty. I was 25, and I didn’t have a job,” Robbins said. “When I finished graduate school, it seemed really appealing, the idea of living on this farm. I romanticized it.”
The farm had been home to Robbins’ maternal grandmother, Jessye Roberson, a painter and a writer who Robbins said drew her to the arts at an early age and ended up inspiring her to pursue a career in photography.
“She spent most of her time painting on the farm,” Robbins said. “I grew up watching her and wanting to be her.”
It wasn’t until after moving to Columbia to teach at the University of South Carolina, where she lives with her husband, that Robbins began work on the project. She photographed the farm and her family there during trips back to the Greenwood area beginning in 2006.
“After marrying my husband, it became really clear that I was never going to be back on the farm,” Robbins said. “I had this really profound sense of sadness that I wouldn’t be back there. For a lot of my friends that grew up in the Delta and left the Delta, they have this same feeling of being incredibly conflicted about this choice to leave.”
During visits back, Robbins said, the focus of the photographs she was taking on the farm began to shift.
“I was making photographs really for myself,” she said. “They were different than the photographs I’d been making before of the landscape.”
Reviewing some of the photographs back in South Carolina, Robbins said the outlines of “Into the Flat Land” start to become clear. “Everything changed for me,” she said. “It really became about this choice to leave — what that was like and what this place meant to my family, what it was like to be there again as an outsider.”
The photographs included in the book have been displayed extensively at galleries and museums for the past five years and have also been published online and in magazines. The photo series earned Robbins the PhotoNOLA prize in 2011 from the New Orleans Photo Alliance, which funded a very limited print run of the book.
The collection was released earlier this year by the University of South Carolina Press and includes a foreword by noted documentary photographer Tom Rankin and a short story by Cynthia Shearer.
Robbins said she’d reached out to Shearer, author of the novel “The Celestial Jukebox,” to contribute to the book after winning the PhotoNOLA prize.
“She sent me this short story,” Robbins said. “Immediately, I got so excited for the potential of combining that story with the photographs. There’s a tone to the story that really resonates. It’s a really nice partner for the images.”
Images from the book as well as other photo projects by Robbins can be viewed online at her website, www.kathleen-robbins.com.
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
