In 1980 Emily G. Kahn (Diploma '98, Fifth Year Certificate '99) made a startling discovery, but she didn't know it at the time. She had gone to Baltimore to clean out her childhood home after the death of her father, and there in the cellar, buried in an old trunk, was a small stack of photograph negatives. Kahn packed up the negatives without looking at them and took them home to Boston.

Twenty-five years later she pulled them back out and was amazed to find a series of casual portraits of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who originated the theory of "conditioning." By this time Kahn, a mother of five, had returned to school and become a photographer. She recognized Pavlov at once; her father, W. Horsley Gantt, had been a doctor and scientist who'd studied closely with Pavlov during the 1920s and established the Pavlovian Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University medical school. Kahn herself had run Pavlovian experiments in her father's lab as a teenager and young bride.

The negatives depicted Pavlov performing surgery, throwing a stick, resting on a couch in his home. "The images are intimate and classic," Kahn says—much like her own documentary photographs. In her first large-scale project, which she created at the Museum School, Kahn told the story of Millie, a woman whose grandmother had been a slave on Kahn’s great-grandparents' Virginia farm. "I was astounded," Kahn says, by the similarities between her own narrative instincts and her father's.

"I'm interested in people—where they go, what they see, what they touch," she says. " At first [the Pavlov images] seemed surprising to me because my father never considered himself a photographer. He was so much a scientist," she says. Yet at the same time, "he was deeply interested in how people interact with each other, what makes them tick."

Kahn "commandeered" the negatives, printed them, and orchestrated a two-generation art history project. She traveled to Russia in 2005 and donated a selection of the prints to the Pavlov Memorial Museum and the Pavlov International Research Center in St. Petersburg. Then, just last month, she gave a small collection of them to former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she'd met when he visited Harvard University last year.

While Kahn's own photography in recent years has grown more abstract rather than documentary, the Pavlov project, in a way, brought her back to the story of her childhood. "So much of my life then revolved around my father's work," she says. "I couldn't not do this."