Robert Glenn Ketchum American, 1947-
Robert Glenn Ketchum (born in Los Angeles) is known for his photography as well as his involvement with the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (1976-82) and the National Park Foundation (since 1980), serving as curator of photography for both organizations. Drawing inspiration from the works of Paul Caponigro, Ketchum culls his subjects from nature and uses his work to express environmental concerns. He has worked in both 35mm and 4 x 5-inch formats, in black and white and color.
A student of Robert Fichter, Robert Heinecken, and Edmund Teske, Ketchum earned a B.A. in design from ucla (1970). In 1970 he founded the photography workshop at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities in Idaho and then continued his education at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and the California Institute of the Arts (M.F.A., 1973). He began teaching at CalArts in 1975, but left his post the following year to work full-time for lacps. In 1977, on a commission from the Friends of the International Ocean Institute, Ketchum traveled to 10 countries with Elisabeth Mann Borgese (German novelist Thomas Mann's daughter) to examine critically the environmental concerns of those countries. Since 1982 he has worked to develop the Appalachian Environmental Arts Center.
Ketchum has received many awards, including two grants for curatorial research from the National Park Foundation (1978, 1979), a materials grant from Ciba-Geigy for Cibachrome printing and masking research (1979), and the ucla Alumni Association's Award of Excellence (1993). In 1985 the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund commissioned Ketchum and his then-wife, Carey D. Ketchum, to photograph the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which was being destroyed by timber-cutting practices sanctioned by the U.S. Forest Service. Originally meant to illustrate legislation proposed to protect the region, the images also became the focus of one of Ketchum's many books, The Tongass: Alaska's Vanishing Rain Forest (1987). In 1986 he was commissioned by the Akron Art Museum, in cooperation with the National Park Service, to photograph the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area. These images were exhibited at the Akron Art Museum and published as part of a retrospective book, The Legacy of Wildness (1993). Ketchum lives in Los Angeles. A.W.