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I
am an Oregon photographer working in hand-painted black and white to produce
lively fine art images of people and nature. I am also a newspaper arts writer
at The Register-Guard
in Eugene, Oregon.
Born in Selma, Alabama, where my father was an
officer at Craig Air Force Base, I grew up in Los Angeles and went to high school
in North Hollywood with a surprising number of movie stars' kids. I studied
history of religion at Harvard University, where I wrote for the Crimson and
received a bachelor's degree in 1975.
After graduation I worked as a reporter for the Long Beach Press-Telegram for five years. I covered cops, courts, city hall, and all the usual journalistic suspects. I interviewed Bob Hope and Muhammed Ali and wrote about the Hillside Strangler case.
I liked newspapering in Southern California but wanted to live in a less crazed environment. I headed to Idaho and worked briefly for the Idaho Statesman. After six months, romance beckoned, and I quit newspapering and moved to Oregon, where I married Lisa in 1984.
In 1983 I started work as a feature writer at
the Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon, where I spend much of my time writing
about art and artists.
My freelance writing and photography have appeared
in such diverse publications as Byte, Working Woman, Animal Sheltering, Oregon
Birds, Oregon Quarterly, Portland magazine, L.A. Stage Alliance and the Los
Angeles Times.
In 2006 I was a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institute for Theater and Musical Theater in Los Angeles.
I live on 18 acres of rural property outside Creswell, Oregon, with my wife, Lisa Strycker, a statistician at Oregon Research Institute in Eugene. Our son, Noah Keefer Strycker, is a bird photographer, illustrator and writer. A student at Oregon State University, he is a regular columnist for WildBird magazine and associate editor of Birding magazine.