BIOGRAPHY: I was born in Saigon, Vietnam on February 13, 1965 to parents in foreign service there, but promptly evacuated with my mother as the Vietnam War heated up. Our family soon moved to Chiang Mai in Thailand, where my brother James was born. Apparently I used to run around the neighborhood with local kids there, speaking Thai and eating at neighbors houses, but I don't remember. My family finally settled in late 1968 near my mother's hometown of Brevard, North Carolina. It was wonderful growing up across the road from farms, surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, and just a mile from the entrance to the to the Pisgah National Forest. I was given my first camera at four years of age, an old Kodak Baby Brownie. Later I learned black & white printing with my aunt Patricia Austin, a professional photographer, and helped out in the family photography and music store. As a teenager I became more serious about photography, and I borrowed my father’s Pentax SLRs . I went for my last two years of high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Math where I learned how to develop black & white film. |
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I had planned only to major in Biology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, but I took so many photography and art history classes that it became easy to add a second major in Art & Art History. I was fortunate to study under two terrific photo instructors at the Rice Media Center, Geoff Winningham and Peter T. Brown. I started to print color negative film in 1986, exploring downtown Houston at night with long time exposures. By a year later, I became good enough at color printing that Peter took me on as his darkroom assistant. It was a fabulous experience printing Peter’s 4x5” and medium format color negatives, and talking with him about his photographic explorations of the geography and rural architecture of the Great Plains. Working with Peter taught me better color darkroom habits, and left a lasting impression of how beautiful a fine color photographic print can be.
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 Self Portrait, 2007 |
After earning the BFA in 1988, I returned to Brevard working as staff photographer for the Brevard Music Center, a summer music camp. I documented students at practice, musical performances, and even fully staged operas. It was a challenging and satisfying temporary job. In 1989 I moved to Boston, Massachusetts and worked as a photojournalist for the gay and lesbian newspaper BayWindows. Later that year I found work at the Biology Teaching Labs at Harvard University, where I met the man who would become my constant companion, Lansing Wagner. I continued to work on photography in my spare time, and built a small color darkroom in a walk-in closet in our condominium in Boston. Lansing and I vacationed in Maine and I loved photographing the coast around Brooklin and with Acadia National Park. We began collecting Japanese prints. From 2004 to 2007 I photographed protests for and against same-sex marriage in and around the Massachusetts statehouse. In November of 2007 I married Lansing. During spring 2007, I took a History of Japanese Art with Dr. Tanya Ferretto Steel at Harvard Extension School. Inspired by Japanese painting and prints, I began to shoot 645 film diptychs around Boston. But I love the diptychs I later shot around Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula best. I self-published In Eastern Light, a book of these Maine diptychs at the end of 2007 for friends and family. |
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Steven Keirstead Hac Facit MMVIII, Copyright 1987-2008, Steven Keirstead Photography |
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