Meet The Authors

Mike McClure

artifact@wyoming.com

http://wyomingauthors.pbwiki.com/Michael-McClure

Lander photographer Mike McClure grew up in Wyoming, earned a journalism degree from Wayne State University, and worked as a photographer for United Press International and the Detroit Free Press before returning to the state in 1971. He has studied photography with Ansel Adams, Jerry Uelsmann, John Sexton and Robert Gilka. In 1980, he was awarded a grant from the Wyoming Council for the Humanities and the Union Pacific Railroad for "Wyoming Tradition and Transition," a 74-photograph exhibit still housed at the Wyoming State Museum and considered a documentary resource.

In the late 1990s, working on his book Camping Wyoming, McClure began documenting historic sites in remote areas of the state. Those pictures became a 90-photograph exhibit, "Artifact: A cultural Geography of Wyoming," which opened at the State Museum in 2003 and is in the museum's traveling exhibits program. His 2007 book of the same title expands the material from that exhibit and adds a foreword by Phil Roberts and essays by Michael Bies, Joyce Evans, Mary Flitner, Todd Guenther, Mary Hay, Mark Higdon, and Dan Whipple.

Recently, McClure received the 2007 Governor's Art Award for Excellence in the Arts. The "Artifacts" exhibit will be on display at the National Historic Trails Center in Casper during the Equality State Book Festival. McClure will speak on the panel "Words, Pictures, and the Local Past," at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 18th, at the Fort Caspar Museum, and will be available to sign books following the panel.