Language projects
Lens-based work

Analog
Hope Kelham
From Roadkill
2019

Photography’s ability to complicate and validate the exuberance and tragedy of living has been holding an open space for untranslatable visions. I write to relive the memory of place and I photograph space to mark the existence of severed memory. I visited this abandoned hanger, the summer before it was demolished, in Indiana, as part of a larger series on forgotten and neglected places in the rural Midwest. 

I stood in doorframes of what might have been someone’s office to watch sun shift through holes in the roof, light rippling onto the fallen architecture. That summer, I was thinking about the election, the humid and fiery air, the impending brood of large cicadas soon to hatch, and love, wondering if photographs were capable of documenting the unease that lingered around them.

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Editorials
Hope Kelham
Emily
2021

I work with creatives and professionals who want portraits that reflect their authenticity.

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WeddingsHope Kelham
Hunter and Tessa, 2022

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Weddings
Hope Kelham
for Leigha, 2022

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Water damage
Hope Kelham
Falling


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Information
Hope Kelham


Hope Kelham is a photographer, multidisciplinary artist, and poet living in Wisconsin. Her work centers confessional image-making, living memory, and the discarded subliminal. She is compelled to decenter beauty while mastering beauty’s decree. 

Interested in how imagery and language elasticizes over time, she engages with the enduring tension between women’s studies,  queer history, and fine art. 

She supports a Free Palestine. 


Education
Master of Fine Arts
Creative Writing
Boise State University

Bachelors of Arts
Studio Arts
Women’s and Gender Studies
Creative Writing
Purdue University


Publications
Kelham, Hope. “water damage/earth rot elegy.” The Raleigh Review, 2025. 

Kelham, Hope. “untitled.” Meridian, 2024

Kelham, Hope. “we’ve eaten the ozone again.” The Portland Review, Aug. 2022. 

Kelham, Hope. “the sound of burning paper mâché.” The Portland Review, Aug. 2022. 


Press
The Gendered Bathroom, Purdue Alumnus, 2020


Employment
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Communications Specialist
2024—present

Free Poetry
Graphic Designer
2020—present

Boise State University
Graduate Instructor, Writing and Rhetoric
2020—2023

Purdue University 
Photography Lab Technician
2018—2020


Contact
hope.kelham@outlook.com 




Elegies
Hope Kelham
2023

Show me / Eternity, and /
I will show / you Memory

Emily Dickinson

Imitating a carousel book, here, the lyric is layered with theater, oscillating scenes that intercede with the aftermath of present and future climate catastrophes. Utilizing prophecy, stage direction, collage, and obsolete language, the poems slew forward as though slide projector slides, each calling the other forth in memoriam. Speakers mourn their earth, each other, and themselves while staring outwardly, often idly, into their presents.


Tarot
William Blake
Pity, 1795
Relief etching, printed in color and finished with pen and ink and watercolor

Collaged tarot in response to Blake.

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water damage/earth rot elegy
Hope Kelham
The Raleigh Review, 2025























© Hope Kelham 2027