Writer and photographer Bob Keefer graduated from Harvard University in 1975 and spent nearly five decades as a newspaperman before retiring in 2024 to turn his attention to landscape and nature photography. He wrote about art and artists for most of the 30 years he worked at The Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon, produced an online blog about the arts in Eugene for three years, and served as arts editor of Eugene Weekly from 2017 to 2024.
In 2006 he was a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts’ Journalism Institute for Theater and Musical Theater in Los Angeles.
Born in Selma, Alabama, Bob grew up in Los Angeles, and has long been fascinated by the landscapes and mythology of the American West. He’s been taking pictures since he picked up an old Brownie camera in his parents’ house at age 11. As an adult, he began to play with hand coloring black and white photographs of nature and its landscapes in the late 1990s, using the lush, archaic medium to document the forests, deserts, and coasts of the West.
Since then Bob has shown his unique artwork at galleries and exhibitions around the West, including the Art About Agriculture exhibit at Oregon State University, the Karin Clarke Gallery in Eugene and Gallery Wild in Jackson, Wyoming. He’s enjoyed artist residencies at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming and at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. He counts among his artistic influences the romantic painted landscapes of Albert Bierstadt, the classic black and white photos made by Western photographers from Carleton Watkins to Ansel Adams, and the cinematic strangeness of David Lynch.
Bob is the author of a noir thriller, Idaho: A (dark) love story, published in 2015.
