Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Rob Kangas made some of his first photographs after retrieving his late father’s Argus C3 camera from a desk drawer. After high school, he worked for four years during the mid-seventies in the Surgery Department at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. He then became interested in a possible career as a medical photographer.
He enrolled in The Center for Creative Studies, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Photography in 1980. During his studies there, his interests in art and photographic education expanded, pulling him away from the medical field.
This led to him enrolling in the MFA Program at The University of Michigan. He taught undergraduate classes in photography for two and a half years as a graduate student. As his work transitioned from black and white to color during this time, he was asked to teach the color photography courses at U of M for a year. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Photography in 1985.
During the next two years (the difficult, “post grad” years) he taught photography classes at three separate institutions part time, while working full time as a commercial dye transfer printer.
In 1987 he was hired as the Program Coordinator of the Photography Department of Oakland Community College, Royal Oak. He is currently in his 37th year in this role as a full time photographic educator. He has continued to make and exhibit his personal photography during this time.
As an exhibiting artist since 1979, he has had 8 solo exhibitions, 2 two person shows, and participated in over 75 group exhibitions. He was the recipient of an Individual Creative Artist’s Grant from The Michigan Council for the Arts. His work is in the collections of The Detroit Institute of Arts and Oakland University.
His work has been featured in two exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts - Beyond Big and more recently Detroit After Dark. The latter exhibition was published in a book of the same name by the DIA and distributed by Yale University Press.