About Anna

In little over a year Anna Lee Keefer has become my closest collaborator and one of my closest friends. I live in London, Anna lives in Oregon, USA and we have yet to meet but we converse at length almost every day online. Apart from the projects we have undertaken together we regularly share ideas, thoughts, works in progress etc.

Apart from being a highly accomplished photographer, Anna also works in several other media too.

You can see more of her photographic work here:

pixelatures

You can also see the range of her work in other media at her website here:

anna lee keefer

Anna has also agreed to allow me to show her Holga Horse series of images that represent for me a personal favourite. Ever since I first saw these images I have been enraptured by them. Quite simply, they are one of the best sustained series of equine images I have ever seen. Here is what Anna herself has written about them:

"As a very young child I was plagued by the hard fact that there existed only boys and girls. My desire for another gender, an alternative to boys and their tricks or girls and their games, engrossed and exhausted me.

As an adolescent I discovered horses were in fact what I had been yearning for as a child.

I found them to be the perfect alternative...

Though they lived in my world, they seemed to inhabit a whole different realm. To be sure, horses are large sentient beings endowed with immense raw power and the utmost soulful grace, but in truth, they are big and sweaty and can carry you off real fast, literally and metaphorically.

I started making the horse photographs in 2000, with a traditional medium format camera.

I quickly discovered that the images I was able to make did not satisfy me, as they were not at all what I knew, saw, or felt, when standing near to the magnificent beasts; they were bad translations.

I had seen photographs that had been made with Holga cameras, and realized that, due to their plastic lens technology with the tendency to distort light, they would serve my purposes more precisely.

The Holga cameras were key in making the Holga Horses photographs accommodate my vision.

You may think that they are photographs, but, actually, they are an epic love poem."