Posted: 3/3/2025
Dunn combines science and artistry in photography
By Ronica Stromberg
From fashion runways to sharks and stingrays, Keegan Dunn's photographic interests have shifted in the past few years. He traces the shift back to a cottonwood tree.
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln integrated science major was studying fashion photography at Metropolitan Community College and interning at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. He started overhearing talk about cutting down an old tree on the art center’s campus.
"Something really rubbed me wrong about that, and I didn't even care about trees too much at that point, which now I've become obsessed with them," he said. "And a lot of my work is about documenting how trees grow in specific areas and whatnot, kind of based just purely off that tree."
Dunn sought a way to make the cottonwood tree last longer if it came down. He took bark from it and made natural dyes, which later became a big part of his work.
The Nebraska junior had learned at Metropolitan Community College about cyanotypes, blue photographic images first created in the 1800s. He used this method, adding cottonwood bark to the chemical bath he dyed paper in, and produced a photo of a childhood friend in the Platte River.
Dunn had spent much time playing on the Platte with this friend and others after moving from Tacoma, Washington, to Bellevue, Nebraska, in elementary school. As a teen, he and 40-50 friends would gather tents and grills on the riverbank, play their music and picnic on the Platte. These memories flooded back to him as he developed the cyanotype.
The resulting image set in deep blue raises more questions than it answers with its human figure blurring into the waters. The vintage-looking white frame hints at an earlier time, its edges also blurred slightly like memories.
Dunn said the cyanotype accomplished what he wanted, expressing symbolism of the region and appealing to memories most Nebraskans hold of the role water has played in their lives.
"I was gathering significance from that sense of place and understanding that I can generate a sense of home for people more than just myself, I suppose, and looking at it in terms of ‘We're Nebraskans, and we're water people,'" he said.
By this time, he had shifted in interest from training to photograph fashion models. Instead, he focused his lens on water, trees and the natural environment, sometimes including people interacting with those subjects. He used what he had learned making the cyanotype of his childhood friend to capture one of his next images, of four boys playing on a downed tree.
Although he usually used a Pentax 645 with its auto focus and auto exposure to quickly capture images, he slowed the camera timing to photograph the boys running on the tree. He also used a bad lens, further blurring the image. The resulting photograph he titled 'Nebraska' and said it showed his view of Nebraska outdoorsmanship.
He then bought an underwater dive camera to better explore his interest in water and shoot photos in creeks and reefs. He enrolled at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in fall 2024 as an integrated science major with focuses in fisheries and wildlife and in photography. He chose a minor in environmental and sustainability studies.
In January 2025, he traveled to the Bimini Islands on the Bahamas study abroad trip and shot photos of coastal ecosystems. The 14 students and two faculty advisors took field trips with the Bimini Biological Field Station, or “Shark Lab,” during the day. In the ocean, the students and faculty clung to float lines from the boat and watched marine biologists interact with ocean life below. Dunn captured photos of nurse sharks and hammerheads from these sessions, and then, in a cage dive, photographed bull sharks.
On the shorelines, he and the other travelers took photos of stingrays and smaller sharks.
Dunn used black-and-white film for these photos and a development process popular in the 1900s, silver printing. In it, he enlarged his film negatives on paper chemically treated to be sensitive to light and then, basically, printed light onto the paper. Dunn had learned silver printing at Metropolitan Community College and said he found the process meditative, allowing him more time to reflect on his memories.
"Silver printing is not easy," he said. "And so, I sit there and mess up my own memory a couple of times until I get an image that looks good, and I think that it allows for an extra point of reflection when I'm working, which is cool. And so, that's another thing that kind of drives it is the fact that I get so much hands-on time with these photographs and with these experiences."
He rarely uses color film, never having taken a class on it in college. He said when he’s shooting a photo, he now sees it in black and white, but even as a child, he tended to sketch in shades of black and white rather than color.
"I think that losing my distractions of color helps me focus what the image is really about," he said.
In the Bahamas, as he grew more accustomed to the tropical environment and his fellow travelers, he included more of his new friends in photos. After an hour or two in the ocean, battling water, he said they would be tired but in good spirits that he wanted to capture on film.
In the evenings, he and friends would go behind the lab to a beach where they could walk out on sandbars for about two football fields in low tide. They would check out the snails, mollusks, Portuguese man-of-war and shells and share their discoveries.
Dunn was building a sense of place in the Bahamas as he had in Nebraska. While studying landscape ecology and the way that people use that landscape, he was building memories and preserving them for all with his camera.
He could not resist taking a photo of Egg, a rescue dog at the Shark Lab that greeted the travelers when they returned to their quarters at the end of the day. The photo Dunn took showed Egg tied to a picnic table while Shark Lab employees extended an awning on the equipment shack.
"I guess the attraction for me was to say, 'OK, well, in 20 years, the Shark Lab can look at this, and we can remember the building of the space and remember Egg, who's important to the community,’” he said.
Dunn is still shaping his own future and said he looks at education as an opportunity to say yes to more things and photography as a tool of expression.
"I just want to keep putting myself in positions to learn about people and to learn about their relation to natural environments,” he said. “And so, I exist in this sort of future gray area of ‘Well, what will I say yes to next?’ But if I were to say that I had a goal, it would be to continue building dialogue across the world as far as how people are interacting with their water and how people are interacting with their environment. It's almost like a regional look at how people are thinking and dreaming and remembering where they're from."