Long Exposure: My Life In and Beyond the Copper Country

Long Exposure is a lively and probing self-portrait by Joe Kirkish, a living legend of Michigan’s Copper Country. Renowned as a photographer, a Michigan Tech humanities professor, a pioneering public radio producer and film series organizer, as well as an art critic and local columnist, Kirkish has been an indefatigable cultural force in his hometown of Houghton and throughout the Keweenaw Peninsula.
His memoir spans his childhood years in the 1920s and ‘30s growing up within an immigrant clan of Lebanese merchants in a mining community, his adventure-filled quest for identity and independence outside the U.P., and his eventual return to his rural roots to ply his prodigious artistic, teaching, and journalistic talents over six decades. Woven into the narrative are fascinating portraits and cameos of the personalities who helped shape his life and work, including visionary educators such as Robert Gard (University of Wisconsin), John Schulze (University of Iowa), and Muggs Lorber (Camp Nebagamon), along with vivid accounts of his encounters with a medley of celebrities ranging from John Kander (Broadway musical composer) to Edward Teller (“father of the H-bomb”) to Bill Siemering (creator of NPR’s All Things Considered).
Long Exposure is eloquently written with easy, fast-paced reading that has you hooked before you realize it, traveling back through the 1900s in Michigan’s Copper Country. Joe makes you feel like you’re listening to your favorite uncle tell you stories about what it was like when he was growing up, with twists and turns that will surprise even those who know him.
Evelyn Massaro
Retired station manager, WNMU Public Radio 90, Marquette, Michigan
Joe Kirkish’s Long Exposure is a wonderful personal account of the peregrinations of an artist in academia. Joe’s narrative of his experience is important for all artists who hesitate between an artistic and an academic career. Joe showed me that making a living as an artist was possible.
Alain Briot
Artist and author of Mastering Landscape Photography and Marketing Fine Art Photography
An early passion for drama, photography, and film, along with a deep desire to serve his community, spawned multiple, interwoven careers for immigrant son and Copper Country native Joe Kirkish. Besides teaching from 1956 to 1988 in the Humanities Department at Michigan Technological University, Kirkish also founded WGGL (the FM campus station that became one of the charter NPR stations). For over sixty years, he has been a columnist for Houghton’s Daily Mining Gazette. He was the 2002 recipient of Michigan Tech’s prestigious Clair M. Donovan award for his extracurricular services to the university and community, and his sustained efforts to promote the cinematic arts earned him the 2017 City Light Award from Tech’s 41 North Film Festival.
Kirkish’s career as a photographer also spans many decades. Beginning in his teens, he did freelance work, first for the Gazette and eventually for college and daily newspapers throughout the region. In addition, he developed the photography program at Camp Nebagamon (Wisconsin), which houses a collection of his work shot there from 1952 to 1967. His fine art photography has been featured in major magazines (including Popular Photography, US Camera, and Modern Photography), and he has exhibited at art galleries, museums, and art fairs in Michigan and beyond, garnering numerous awards.