Bob Keefer reaches deep into the past for the archaic process he uses to take a contemporary look at Western landscape and wildlife: hand-colored black and white photography.
As a long-time arts writer in Eugene, Bob is a familiar name in the Oregon arts world. He wrote for The Register-Guard for 30 years, increasingly focusing on art and artists, before leaving the paper in 2013. In 2017 he became arts editor at Eugene Weekly, where he retired in 2024 to work at photography full time.
Bob began experimenting with hand-colored photos in about 2000, initially shooting with film - Tri-X developed in Rodinal, for you photo nerds - and working with traditional Marshall's Photo-Oil Colors on fiber-based darkroom prints. He has since moved on to shooting with digital cameras and printing on a wide-base Epson printer using carbon-pigment black ink on archival paper. The photos are all colored by hand, with paint on a paintbrush. Photoshop is not involved.
His hand-colored work has been shown in galleries around the West, including a solo show at the now-defunct Jacobs Gallery inside Eugene's Hult Center for the Performing Arts, and is held in the Art About Agriculture permanent collection at Oregon State University.
He has enjoyed two artist residencies, at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest near Blue River in 2014 and 2015, and at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts outside Saratoga, Wyoming, in 2016.
Bob curated a photography show in 2009 at the Karin Clarke Gallery, and was co-curator of RURAL, a large show of work by rural Oregon artists, at the Umpqua Valley Art Center in Roseburg in 2022.
He and his wife live east of Creswell on 20 forested acres that provide a lot of his subject matter, though he frequently takes his camera to the Oregon coast, the eastern Oregon desert, and to Death Valley.