The Man Behind the Camera
Meet Mark Chester, whose unique travel photographs of Americans on the road reflect his smart and funny personality
Greetings, all! Mark Chester occupies a unique niche in my life in that he introduced me to the first woman I ever brought home to meet my mother. This occurred when we were both living and working in San Francisco—Mark as a professional photographer, me as a freelance magazine writer.
Mark always carried an air of mystery about him in those days. I would see him around town or at the magazine we worked for in the city, then he would disappear for a while, then reappear and vanish again shortly after that.
There was actually nothing very mysterious about what he was doing, as he was frequently flying off to shoot photographs for The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other august publications. The pictures Mark takes reflect his humor-loving personality and view of the world. He’s funny, smart, with a lively wit, a keen but compassionate observer of the foibles of human nature and as one reviewer put it, “a social commentator and a connoisseur of Americana.”
A little bit about Mark appeared here for the first time two weeks ago when we described his years-long odyssey to tell the stories of new American citizens in Massachusetts, where he lives. His photographs grace the permanent collections of museums around the country and are featured in a dozen books including Dateline America, a collection of essays by the late esteemed CBS-TV journalist Charles Kuralt.
His latest book, Roadshow Anthropology, is a collection of black and white photographs that showcase Mark’s often quirky and comic take on all the myriad people and things one sees when one climbs into a vehicle and sets off to explore the highways and byways and back roads of this vast fruited plain that is the U.S. of A.
In fact, that is exactly the premise of the book—Mark shooting photographs from inside his Subaru, frequently while the car was still moving.
“The methodology is akin to my being a ‘street’ photographer,” he explains, “only I was sitting in the driver’s seat shooting from my car. I could only use a digital camera with auto focus. I did not look at the screen on the camera, as my eyes were always on the road eyeing traffic.”
Using a Canon PowerShot point and shoot digital camera, he shot his photographs directly through the front windshield or the side windows of the car. His vehicle wasn’t always moving, sometimes he was parked in a mall or filling up at a gas station when something noteworthy captured his attention. Mostly his pictures center on his home state but there are images from the west and other regions of the country too.
Here’s a real treat—a small sampling of the dozens of images Mark captured on his roadshow anthropological tour, with comments by the man behind the camera:
Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggago, etc.
“Driving to the Dudley Library [in Worcester County, MA] to install an exhibition, I saw these letters—44 of them—on top of a strip mall. I was curious and stopped in the pizza shop to inquire. I asked the owner if there was another site that showed the name. She gave me directions.
“It was the name of a Native American lake. They were written in bold white letters on a highway bridge, and they really stood out. I positioned my car to face the bridge to get a clear shot. Suddenly, I saw a trailer truck approaching, and clicked the shutter above the letters which appeared to be the length of the 53-foot trailer.”
LaundroMutt
“Cambridge, MA. I had heard about the name of this business. But it was located on a rotary preventing me to get a straight-on photograph. I like the clever name. So I drove onto the sidewalk in front of the sign to take the photograph with a 24mm wide angle lens, hoping a dog owner would enter. But a traffic policeman ordered me to move the car before I could get it.”
Marilyn Monroe Day
“Provincetown, MA. It seemed it was Marilyn Monroe Day. I had gone to a wedding in Ptown. Driving to the wedding ceremony, I saw the photos of Monroe propped up against an SUV filled with Monroe ephemera at a garage sale. I stopped in front to shoot her in all her glory, then headed to the wedding, when I saw these Marilyn portraits painted on a garage.”
Walk-Ins or…Crawl-Ins
“Lawrence, MA. Driving back from Lawrence Library after an evening presentation of the New Americans exhibition, this sign stopped me in my tire treads. It struck me both as funny and insensitive. I had passed it and turned around to place the car in a clear shot position. I chose this version showing the headlights of an oncoming vehicle to balance the composition.”
Degas and Van Gogh
“Woods Hole. Driving through the village of my hometown of 750 people, I saw the car’s gas cap, which made me smile.”
Zero Visibility
On his journeys Mark drove thousands of miles around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not to mention all the miles he logged on a previous cross-country trip. Here, while cruising along Interstate 40 in Arizona, despite there being no visibility possible, he managed to see this sign with all of the train cars behind it, stop, and get the shot.
Speaking personally, from my travels around northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, I always thought Sasquatch was only a western phenomenon. But no, as Mark discovered, they have concerns about him in the Commonwealth as well:
Mark is a writer as well as a photographer and as he says, “I like the visual pun. Many of the pairings in Roadshow Anthropology seem to be puns. Language plays an important component in pairing the images. One of my favorite pairings is this one, with the license plate AAH and the truck.”
Mark thinks of Roadshow Anthropology as “a storybook and not an art book. The ‘story’ is interpreted by the viewer…there’s no wrong story! We all see something different.” Mark does indeed see things differently, and that’s a good thing for all of us who love a good laugh and the joys and marvels of the open road.
