55 Years of Making: Mark Chester Reflects on His Photography Career

Included with paid museum admission, FREE with membership.

This talk is offered in conjunction with Chester's two concurrent exhibitions: Mark Chester Photographs: Sublime to Ridiculous and Loo-Loos: Restroom Gender Signs, the Photography of Mark Chester.

Photographer Mark Chester reflects on his 55 years making photographs, exhibiting in galleries and museums, publishing feature stories in magazines and newspapers, and publishing six books:

• Dateline America

• No in America

• Twosomes

• The Bay State: A Multicultural Landscape, Photographs of New Americans

• Roadshow Anthropology

• Loo-Loos Restroom Gender Signs

His career path began in New York City working at ASCAP – American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Chester cites that his assignment to illustrate essays for Charles Kuralt’s Dateline America book in 1979 was a pivotal and influential experience that opened opportunities to pursue photojournalism as his profession.

The current exhibitions, Sublime to Ridiculous and Loo-Loos, Restroom Gender Signs, represent a variety of topics that caught his attention, from street photography, environmental portraiture, photo essays to writing articles accompanied by his photographs. The images show slices of life, from whimsy to poignancy. They show a dedication of being seriously silly and seriously serious.

They are pictures of people, places and things that have touched him in some emotional, intellectual, and whimsical way. Said author and travel writer, Paul Theroux about his book, Twosomes, 2011:

“Twosomes is an amazing book that could only have been created out of a lifetime of travel and observation by an indefatigable and watchful photographer: In this juxtaposition of matching moods and paraphernalia, Mark Chester shows us in an ingenious way how the world is related and how we matter to each other. I must add he succeeds in this with tremendous humanity and humor.”