Mike Keogh

by Holly Strother
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 2:49 PM MST

Photography wasn’t the first choice for Casper College photography and printmaking instructor Mike Keogh (key-oh).

He began his art career studying painting in college.

“It didn’t go particularly well for me, although I still liked to paint and everything else for all these years,” Keogh said. “I just found my way into the photo department as a change, and it just kind of clicked, pardon the pun. I really wanted to see what would develop.

“No, I just went in there and took a Photo 1 class and it just seemed to fit.”

He said that before that he had never even been interested in photography, but the experience and exposure to famous photographers like Strichen, Steiglitz and Cartier-Bresson.

“I’d look at their work that I had never seen before, and it seemed so nice and fresh to me,” he said. “Even though a lot of their work was very old, it seemed very new to me.

“After I finished photo, I decided to try my hand at printmaking. They’re both such indirect processes. You have to do so many steps to get to the final thing. They’re so closely related it was just a natural and for me logical step to make.”

Keogh’s current work in progress will be a collection of approximately 400 photographs, accompanied by a growing fictional story about a photographer/farmer and his life.

“It‘s been a really fun project, probably the funniest project I’ve done,”

Keogh said.

He added that some people believe the story is semi-autobiographical, but although he does draw from experiences of his own and his friends, the story is a work of fiction.

He said he primarily works in black and white, but also does take color photographs.

“It seemed a little bit more pure to me, fewer distractions to look at,” he said. “The latest stuff is black and white. That’s just how I see things. It seems to fit with what I’m doing anyway.”

Keogh shoots his pictures using a view camera -- a camera that takes pictures very slowly and one where the photographer’s head is covered by a curtain or cloth.

After 15 years at Casper College, Keogh teaches black and white and color photography, including the traditional dark room wet processing and digital processes, as well as printmaking.

“This way, they can shoot film if they want to and process it,” he said. “They can scan the film and print it digitally or wet. Everybody needs options to do whatever it takes to create, to do whatever the job is, and we‘ve got options now. I think that‘s neat.”

Keogh was born in Michigan, but spent most of his life in the Denver metro area. He graduated from Utah State, then began teaching in Colorado. A year after graduation, he began working for the Thikol Corp. in northern Utah as a technical artist.

Several years later, the CC job came open and Keogh began working in his current position.

He currently lives in Casper. He is married with six children and eight grandchildren. Two more grandchildren are expected this year.

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