Keith Dannemiller was born in Akron, Ohio on May 27, 1949, and educated there in Catholic elementary and high schools. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee with a B.A. in Organic Chemistry. In 1976, after four years in San Francisco, he moved to Austin, Texas where he photographed for The Texas Observer, Third Coast and Texas Monthly. While living there, he began the first of many trips to the north of México, in the area around Espinazo, Nuevo Leon, where he documented the festival of the Niño Fidencio, a folk saint renowned in México during the 1920’s. In 1987 he decided to live and work in México. A relationship that began with the Mexican photo agency Imagenlatina in May, 1987, resulted in two trips to the Middle East (1988 and 1989) to cover the Palestinian Intifada. While currently independent, during the past 31 years he was associated at different times with two US photo agencies: Black Star and Saba. In Latin America, he has covered a wide variety of situations, ranging from Nicaraguan Recontras to street children in México City to life on the US-México border. A recurring theme in his personal work is the effect on the country’s rich traditions while Mexican society constantly reshapes itself. Visual projects that have captured his interest include: a fundamentalist sect that uses exorcism to deal with social problems; portraits from the streets of Mexico City’s Centro Historico; Danzón in public parks; the modern syncretic rituals associated with the growing cult to the Catholic saint, Jude Thaddeus; the struggles of Central American migrants in Mexico enroute to the United States; and currently, investigating the notion of ‘Home/Homeland’ by documenting the lives of the people who make up the immigrant communities of Wilson, North Carolina, USA. His most recent book, Callegrafía, is a look at the intimate strangers who move through the streets of the Centro Histórico of Mexico City each day. He lives with his wife in the Colonia Nápoles of Mexico City
I use a Nikon D700 DSLR with a wide angle lens usually.
