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b'Few Portland artists can claim deeper ties to the city than Julie Keefe. She\\u2019s shot for everyone from the Oregonian to the New York Times; she\\u2019s done major community engagement projects like Hello, Neighbor, where kids in North Portland interview elders about how the neighborhood has changed; and she\\u2019s wrapping up four years as Portland\\u2019s first creative laureate.

But she might be best known, at least in Northeast Portland, as the primary photographer for the Skanner newspaper, where she\\u2019s documented Portland\\u2019s African American community since 1991, as see in the exhibition \\u201cDocument of a Dynamic Community: The Skanner Photography of Julie Keefe," at the Oregon Historical Society through Dec. 18.

The hundreds of photos, drawn from the tens of thousands Keefe has shot, depict the everyday triumphs, challenges, and banalities of life in North, Northeast, and increasingly East Portland.

"What the Skanner did is said, \'here, we\'re going to show you our parades, and we\'re going to show the girl scout troupes and the chess clubs and the golf teams that are bringing people together," says Keefe. "They showed everyday life in a very dynamic, wide-ranging community in ways that we don\'t see in the [mainstream media] headlines. So I felt super privileged to be able to gain trust and respect in a community that I was an outsider in."

The Skanner was started in 1975 by husband-and-wife team Bernie and Bobbie Foster. Living just blocks away from its offices, Keefe started shooting for the paper in 1991. One entire wall of the exhibition is wall-papered in snapshots of everything from Juneteenth parades to political rallies to Rose Princess coronations, depicting hundreds of everyday Portlanders, political figures, and visiting dignitaries like President Obama.

Some of the photos carry bittersweet emotions for Keefe, like one showing the founder of Self Enhancement Inc, Tony Hobson Sr., shaking the hands of students on the opening day of the SEI Academy. The nonprofit has an incredible track record for improving the lives and educational experiences of at-risk youth, and when it was built in Unthank Park, it pushed out a lot of the drug activity. But that in turn led to new folks moving in, which accelerated the gentrification of the neighborhood, pushing out a lot of long-term residents, too, many of them Keefe\\u2019s neighbors.

And then there were the truly heartbreaking events.

"There were times when I was really emotional," she says. "I couldn\'t distance myself \\u2014 I knew a lot of these people. I watched them with their pain. One of the first things I shot was a candle-light vigil, and then when I kept photographing them, it just never stopped. Kendra James was shot by the police three blocks from my house."

The exhibition includes three photos following the death of James: one of her memorial, one of a march against the shooting, and one of a public hearing with the police.

Keefe tells us what it was like to document a community in the interview above.'