PHOTOGRAPHER KEITH BENZE and his wife Cheryl are pictured holding photos featured in an exhibition at the Woodford County Library. His photo of a cat named Charlie, who the couple adopted from the Woodford Humane Society during the pandemic, is on the wall behind them. “He’s my buddy. We love him,” says Benze. The photos in the library exhibition are not for sale, but he says he will give a photo to someone making a minimum donation of $100 to Woodford Humane. (Photo by Bob Vlach)
SKY AND STRATUS – mom and daughter – are featured in one of the photos taken by Keith Benze for his “Furry Faces of the Woodford Humane Society” exhibition at the Woodford County Library. Benze retired as pastor at Versailles Presbyterian Church in October 2024. (Photo by Keith Benze)
A KITTEN NAMED NIRVANA is featured in a photo shot by Keith Benze for his “Furry Faces of the Woodford Humane Society” exhibition at the Woodford County Library. (Photo by Keith Benze)
By Bob Vlach
Woodford Sun Staff
Taking pictures has been a part of Keith Benze’s life since he was 13 years old. It became his full-time hobby after retiring as pastor at Versailles Presbyterian Church two years ago, he says.
“I consider myself a landscape photographer. That’s where my love is,” says Benze, who retired in October 2024. “I love to be outside. I love to be hiking.”
He brings his camera along wherever he and his wife, Cheryl, travel – carefully picking a spot and exact time for taking a landscape photo like his sundown at the Smoky Mountains.
They’ve also traveled to Scotland, “and we just get in a car and drive. And I take pictures as we go,” says Benze.
Often, he only has one shot to get a photo, so he puts a lot of planning into a trip. He also learned to “turn around and see what’s behind you” during a trip to Yosemite National Park.
Benz freely acknowledges he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with all his landscape photos, which he considers “fine art photography.”
His first exhibition is now at the Woodford County Library, but the photos featured in the Rich Gallery are images he’s taken of “The Fury Faces of the Woodford Humane Society.”
“This has been a yearlong love,” says Benze.
He started taking photos for the Humane Society’s website about two years ago to help animals get adopted, and soon discovered how much emotion comes from seeing a larger-than-life photo of a kitten.
“The point of the exhibition,” Benze says, “is to get people to look at these animals and go: I want one.” The photos are not for sale, but he says he will give a photo to someone making a minimum donation of $100 to the Woodford Humane Society.
Benze relies on his wife to entertain a kitten with feathers or toys while taking photos with a camera, which “does bursts of 10 to 12 frames a second.” On a recent Tuesday, he says he shot 454 images of 10 cats at the Woodford Humane Society.
“Most of them want to be loved … they want affection,” says Cheryl, who also helps with getting photos of dogs. “So Keith will be sitting on the ground with his camera, and they’ll want to run up to him and love up on him, or come up to me and love up on me. And so I keep a bag of treats that I shake, and I have a squeaky toy.
“Some animals don’t want treats, so you have to figure out what it is that motivates them enough to get (their) attention so Keith can take their picture.”
Benze, who estimates he spends 30 to 40 hours a week in his digital darkroom and with a camera doing what has become much more than a hobby, says a few of his landscape photos are on display at the UK Albert B. Chandler Hospital, where Cheryl was a music therapist before retiring.
His photos were also on the walls of Spark Community Café before being sold after the downtown Versailles restaurant closed. Money from the sale of the photos went toward the nonprofit’s ongoing mission to feed people in the community facing food insecurity, he says.
When he and Cheryl lived in North Carolina before moving here, “We bought a house specifically because we could build a darkroom in the basement,” she says.
Benze says his interest in photography began in junior high school, and continued as a stringer for a local newspaper before he got a job while in college doing promotional photography for a friend’s dad.
Benze grew up surrounded by the farmland of south New Jersey, but his family lived in Los Angeles during his senior year of high school. He moved to Arizona as an undergrad in college.
Benze changed careers after he retired from an international consulting firm, he says, because “I wanted to do something that made a difference.” So, at age 48, he went to seminary and became an ordained minister in 2009.
But no matter where life has taken Benze, photography has always been a way to relax. Yet, it wasn’t until he went on a sabbatical in 2023 and did a self-study that he gained insight into how he could produce creative images evoking emotion.
“I just love this creation, this world. And I love to be in it and I love to capture it in photographs because I like the emotion that the photograph evokes in the person looking at it,” says Benze.
His exhibition at the Woodford County Library continues through Oct. 7.