Art of Medicine
Christopher O'Keefe likes to find new ways to capture images of familiar places. Once he was taking photos of a covered bridge in Contoocook, N.H., but found that none of the angles he was shooting at the level of the road were working well. So instead, he went down to the riverbank. "It ended up being a rather dramatic shot, with the water and rock in the foreground and the bridge midway back and then the sky," he says. "Someone who lives locally saw it. . . . She'd never seen it from that angle before. I enjoy hearing that."
Photography lets me step away from all that, leave it all behind and come back fresh again the next day.
"London Ghosts" was shot on Hungerford Bridge in London, where O'Keefe hired a photo guide who introduced him to "all kinds of places and people that made for great images," he says. "For this shot, we had been playing with making ghostly figures by photographing people with long exposures."
He started pursuing photography seriously in 2011 with training through C1M Photography, a studio in Amherst, N.H. Recently he completed a workshop led by Norwegian photojournalist Otto von Münchow, which culminated in a photo essay O'Keefe created about life on Manchester, N.H.'s Elm Street.
O'Keefe is administrative director for the Psychopharmacology Research Group in the Department of Psychiatry at Geisel. His group works on "amazingly complex studies," he says. "Photography lets me step away from all that, leave it all behind and come back fresh again the next day."
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