Michelle Keim
(Millersburg, Ohio, 1971 - )
American
Michelle Keim grew up in Ohio, and while attending Columbus College of Art and Design she became fascinated by the industrial buildings
that make up a significant part of the state’s landscape. This picture was published in her photobook Iron Beauties, and throughout the related body of work Keim sought to emphasize the force and drama with which industrial structures rise up from the land around them. As the artist understands them, steel mills and power plants contain the same tense beauty and spectacular power as volcanoes and thunderstorms.
Keim started photographing active industrial areas in the Midwest in 1992 and moved to
Chicago three years later to get closer to the great steel metropolis of Gary, Indiana. The scale and function of industry rivals the sublime beauty associated with natural forms and forces.Keim received her MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 and has taught at Columbia College and Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. Her series of industrial landscape photography, “Iron Beauties,” was represented by Catherine Edelman gallery for roughly 10 years and published as a monograph in 2006 by Nazraeli Press. Her landscape work is in the permanent collections of Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Federal Reserve Bank and many other corporate and private collections.
Chicago, Illinois
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