Meet the Founder

Private Record was founded by Michael Kopp, a photographer, educator, and hospitality programmer whose work operates at the intersection of documentary practice, visual culture, and lived experience.

Michael’s career has developed along two parallel paths.

In academia, he serves as Assistant Professor of Art at Bellarmine University, where he teaches photography, digital media, and socially engaged art. His research and teaching are grounded in critical approaches to image-making—examining how photographs shape memory, perception, and the social dynamics of space. This foundation informs a disciplined, observational approach to documentation, emphasizing attention, context, and ethical awareness over production and spectacle.

Alongside this, Michael has built a professional practice in photography and hospitality programming. His work in photography spans over a decade, producing and exhibiting internationally while developing a visual language rooted in documentary and environmental observation. In parallel, his role within hospitality—programming events, shaping guest experience, and producing visual content—has provided direct insight into how environments are designed, activated, and experienced in real time.

These two trajectories—critical image-making and operational hospitality—converge in Private Record.

The practice reflects an understanding that meaningful documentation requires more than technical skill. It requires fluency in the environments being documented: how people move through space, how experiences are structured, and how presence can be preserved without interruption.

Private Record is built on this premise.